July 2007 Archives

A crow perched yesterday on my weather station's wind vane. The angle of the sun on the anemometer must have resulted in a flashing pattern as it spun which attracted his attention. In these pictures the vane is pointing east due to him spinning on it, even though the wind was actually coming from the north. As seen in the second shot, he reached down and physically stopped the anemometer with his beak and held it still for a few moments before finally taking off and returning to a nearby tree.

Taken from our kitchen, Queen Anne, Seattle, WA - July 30, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

Officially titled "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner". Harbor Steps, Downtown, Seattle, WA - July 28, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Donnie, our first foster cat - Jan 29, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Every night, within minutes of 8:00 pm, flock upon flock of crows pass over our house flying south, toward what must be a very large roosting ground near downtown. It starts with a few birds cawing and soon turns into a swarm of black as hundreds of birds silently flap past. Wave upon wave of birds come over the rooftops to the north and swoop past the tree line to the south, on to their nightly endeavors. This lasts for about fifteen minutes, after which the air clears, the sun sets, and only the occasional late straggler caws en route to the gathering.

The pictures really don't do it justice.

All taken from our back porch in Queen Anne - July 26, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

The internet is a series of tubes. What's that, you weren't aware? You obviously missed Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)'s comments on why it is important to allow internet providers to regulate traffic - otherwise the tubes could be filled with junk like this website, and delay the delivery of important internets sent to you by friends.

See here for more, and links to the full speech.

Remember, these are the people who control billions of our tax dollars.

Unassembled Boeing airplanes (in bright green primer), Burlington Northern rail cars (some carrying the planes!), many boats moored in Smith Cove marina, and of course lots of commuters traveling over the Magnolia Bridge and parked in the various lots. Taken from our back porch in Queen Anne - July 25, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

...but didn't regret at the time I bought them. Some have since been sold.

(in no specific order.)

• Creed - Human Clay

  This one took about a year to really turn sour for me. I suspect a lot of people got pulled in by their seemingly rocking music and bellowsome lyrics, only to be miffed by all the pseudo-religious bullcrap that permeated all their interviews about it. It's one thing to be clear and unwavering about your music and its religious aspects like Jars of Clay was, but it's quite another to try and talk out of both sides of your mouth talking about how it's "not religious but well maybe spiritual but not necessarily about Jesus" and such. It reeks of the same crap that Intelligent Design stinks of now.

• Jewel - Spirit

  Yes, I'm admitting to waaay too much by acknowledging that I purchased this album. If it's any consolation, I seem to recall that I picked it up used, but still. The songs here lack the same innocence and airy quality that still gives some appreciation to Pieces of You, but at the time people were clamoring for new material and didn't care much about what exactly it was. This seems to happen to a lot of follow-up efforts to critically acclaimed albums.

• Candlebox - self titled

  I was stunned to discover a few months ago that Candlebox is still together and touring (at least here in their home region of the northwest.) This was one of the first CDs I purchased back when I switched to the format. I signed up for Columbia House (remember their awesome twelve CDs for a penny deal?) and snatched up a bunch of the one-hit-wonders that I saw on MTV back when they still aired videos. I was in a musical void at the time, stuck in suburbia with nothing but corporate "alternative rock" stations and no internet connection. Little did I know I was one of the lucky ones - in Buffalo we had access to most of the Toronto radio stations, and CFNY turned me on to a fair bit of actual decent music before I had a good filter to discern what actually was "decent". That said, this wasn't one of those.

• Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I&II

  Two more Columbia House purchases. When I first abandoned country music back in the early 90s (there's probably an entire separate entry's worth of commentary to show my progression to current music, but I'll save that for another time...) I turned to others to see what they were listening to. Most of my friends on the track and cross country teams were into metal and hard rock, and these albums popped up frequently. Toss in the endlessly repeated 'November Rain' video on MTV and VH1, and the albums were both must-have. Now they're much more must-cringe, but every once in a while cranking the volume up to 11 while playing 'You Could Be Mine' is quite cathartic, so they stay on the shelf.

• Various Artists - City of Angels Motion Picture Soundtrack

  I was among the many people suckered in by the constant airplay of the Alanis Morrissette song 'Uninvited'. Sure it was a decent song - epic in scope, dramatic to the point of near-absurdity, and full of orchestration at a time when that was limited to special appearances by bands at awards shows, but in the end this album was basically a collection of B-sides from a few famous names (Peter Gabriel, U2, etc...) and a bunch of instrumental filler to justify charging full price for what amounts to an EP's worth of music... and often phoned-in efforts at that.

I suspect that I realized many of these albums sucked fairly early on (the prime evidence being mix tapes that I made almost instantly with the one or two "good" songs from each placed on them), but it's hard to admit a mistake like this when you've just spent $15 of your hard-earned dollars when you're only earning about $50 a week. These days, with the advent of broadband internet and downloadable samples (not to mention *cough* other sources of musical material) albums tend to get a much more thorough vetting prior to purchase, both through my own previewing of material, and reviews from other trusted parties. Of course that doesn't stop me from picking up the occasional steamer, but those fall into a different category - albums I regretted immediately.

That said, I guess time will tell if some of the albums I've bought this year and enjoy now land in the regret category a decade hence.

Sometimes science experiments don't quite go as planned, for a variety of reasons. In the case of these two pictures, tools that I thought worked well turned out to not work as advertised and I didn't find out until later. Although the tools didn't work as intended, they still resulted in some pretty pictures that will never see the light of day in an actual science journal since they have no useful information to convey to other researchers, so instead I share them with you here.

The first picture (above - click image for a much larger version) shows a small portion of the dissected brain from an adult Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly). The red color comes from a fluorescent tag attached to an antibody that binds to the protein rhodopsin, which the fly eye uses as part of its vision system. The green color comes from a different fluorescent protein fused to an antibody that I thought recognized the protein I have been studying. Long story short, we have no clue what this antibody actually does bind to, but we do now know with certainty that it doesn't recognize my protein of interest!

This image (again click image for a much larger version) shows part of the adult fruit fly gut, where a specialized sack called der rectaldrusen (roughly translating to "rectal papillae") attaches which the fly uses to reabsorb salts and other essential nutrients prior to expelling waste. The green color here comes from a protein called Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which we thought was being expressed in tissues where my protein of interest normally expresses. In the case of this image, the GFP protein was always turned on in this tissue regardless of what protein's expression pattern we were attempting to study. Luckily this sort of problem is easy to deal with and we just found a different fly line that didn't have this problem and continued our research with that, instead.

Gasworks Park, Wallingford, Seattle, WA - July 3, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Jasper and Delia in the bedroom window - March 6, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Spider and web on our back deck, Queen Anne, Seattle, WA - July 9, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Just overheard on The World, a Public Radio International production that airs locally on KUOW (a Seattle NPR affiliate) in a discussion about the ongoing sexual revolution in China:

[A]ccording to a survey done a couple of years ago in seven major Chinese cities[...] Among respondents under 20, the average age people first had sex was 17 and a half. For those in their 30s, the average age was much older: 24.

I'll leave this one as an exercise for the student to identify the flaw.

Composting is growing at the UW

Kitchens at the UW have been composting their food waste for some time -- but now composting is coming out front, and becoming everybody's business.

The gathering of food waste from kitchens is called "pre-consumer" collection. That's been under way since 2004 and now includes virtually all restaurants on campus. Recently, The Rotunda Café, in the Health Sciences Complex, as well as Eleven 01, McMahon 8 and Ian's Domain, have been collecting "post-consumer" compost -- plate waste, biodegradable cups, plates, napkins and stir sticks.

The entire article goes into a fair bit of discussion about finding bodegradable alternatives to one-use products such as plastic cutlery, coffee cups, and take-out boxes. Corn-derived cutlery is on the way, and a sugar cane, reed and straw mixture is being developed to make foam-like take-out containers. How cool would it be to finish a delicious meal (well, since we're talking about campus food "delicious" might be the wrong word) and then be able to eat your silverware or the container? They could add flavorings to them to make a high-fiber dessert! It reminds me a lot of taco salads that come in the giant corn-chip bowl, and clam chowder that comes in a bread bowl.

Thesis writing finally has a green light.

This means I'm either going to be hard-pressed to find time to make updates here... or far more likely I'm going to be making a dozen posts per day out of distraction and writer's block.

Food-trash recycling at homes to be required by Seattle in '09

All single-family homes in Seattle must sign up for table-scrap recycling in 2009, the City Council decided Monday. ... Reducing food trash was a piece of a larger plan the council unanimously approved Monday to reduce the amount of garbage sent to the landfill.

This is good, but it certainly needs more. For one, apartment buildings and businesses are exempted from the requirement (though they can voluntarily sign up, just like the current system in place for everyone in the city) and the setup as currently envisioned is sure to upset many people. Instead of simply supplying a yard/food waste bin similar to our current recycling bins, the city is going to offer multiple sizes of bin and charge different rates for each, similar to the current garbage can system.

That part is ridiculous in multiple ways. First, it's absurd to charge people additional fees to reduce the city waste stream. Unlike regular garbage, which must be disposed of in a landfill, all the food and yard waste is sent to a regional composting facility, which then sells the resulting product in stores. This is akin to recycling, where companies buy recyclable materials and turn them into new products which they sell to industry and consumers. The city simply includes any recycling costs (pickup, transportation and maintenance) in the standard household utility bills, so why should mandatory composting bins be any different?

Similarly, why are we encouraging people to select smaller bins for cheaper rates? This is likely to encourage people to just get the smallest bin available and dispose of any extra food or yard waste in their regular garbage can, just like they currently do... which negates the entire purpose of mandating food scrap collection!

The most logical plan of action here would be to provide "free" composting cans to all households (and by all means make multiple sizes available since households do vary in waste production!), then increase the cost of garbage can collection to cover any additional fees this new collection requires.

This would encourage people to select smaller garbage cans (thereby saving them some waste collection costs), which will likewise encourage them to separate out more of their recyclable and compostable waste. Some fine-tuning of costs and collection will probably be required as the system comes into full use and people adjust their waste habits, but that's to be expected and should be fairly transparent to the end user if done correctly.

Offices Use Ice Instead of AC

[S]ome office towers and buildings have found a way to stay cool while keeping the AC to a minimum by using an energy-saving system that relies on blocks of ice to pump chilly air through buildings.

The systems save companies money and reduce strain on the electrical grid in New York, where the city consumes more power on hot summer days than the entire nation of Chile.

Whether or not the numbers quoted in the article regarding cutting down on pollution are true, the fact that they're using electricity late at night to make the ice, rather than during peak time during the day, means that there's less strain on electrical systems, less demand for more capacity, and less need to build yet more power plants.

And of course, yet again it goes to show that modernized versions of old solutions (think of it as a giant swamp cooler on steroids, perhaps?) are often just as effective as, if not better than, modern day alternatives.

Next up, the Pentium IV abacus!

After a lot of screwing things up, I think the page design is finally back to something close to what I was envisioning in my head when I started messing with it in the first place.

There are still a lot of things I want to change, such as the bullet-stars on the right and some color tweaks, but overall things are a little glossier now.

As for the banner up top (assuming you can see it)? That's a composite image of many lightning strikes from the same evening as the pictures in the post two prior to this one, along with a little work in Photoshop to improve the contrast.

I might do up a bunch of banners like that one and cycle through them using some scripting, but for now let's be happy I got one working and call it a day.

Suki, our current Seattle Animal Shelter foster cat, is available for adoption!

Taken on our back porch, Queen Anne, Seattle, WA - July 8, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

We don't often see thunderstorms in this area of the country. Something to do with the geography messing with weather patterns that normally form them. When we do get a storm, it generally consists of one or two flashes of lighting, a rumble of thunder, and everyone gasping at how wild it was. Last night was something of an anomaly, however, as we had a whole string of storms rolling along the foothills of the Cascades and up the Puget Sound corridor. These two pictures were of a cell that was located somewhere over the Kitsap Peninsula. I set up the nice digital SLR on a tripod out on the back deck, opened up the shutter and crossed my fingers. Among the hundred or so useless shots I managed to capture a few strikes.

Kitsap Peninsula (as viewed from Queen Anne, Seattle), Washington - July 12, 2007 (click images to enlarge)

Ford Motor Company put out a press release today touting a pro-environmental manufacturing move that at first struck me as utterly absurd, until you think about the potential numbers involved.

They're going to start using a soy-based foam (instead of the current industry standard of pure petroleum-based foam) in seat cushions and padding, starting with the 2008 Mustang and expanding to other makes and models in the following years.

Now this may seem silly at first given that amount of foam used in the manufacturing of some seats is miniscule compared to the amount of gasoline a car uses in its lifetime, but going back to the "every step counts" concept this is still a significant shift and hopefully something that many other industries which use foam can follow.

Based on the press release, they estimate that each vehicle produced today uses approximately 30 pounds of foam, with a total of 9 million pounds of the foam used annually. This new soy foam isn't perfect - it's only 24 percent renewable in the current design (presumably to meet federal safety standards?), but that's still potentially over 2.1 million pounds of renewable, biodegradable material replacing petroleum-derived sources. Furthermore, additional design advances and regulatory testing should be able to increase the percentage of renewable material in the foam in the future, pushing aside yet more petroleum-derived materials.

The other important thing to consider is that many businesses tend to "follow the leader". A little pressure on other car companies to follow suit (especially if the initial research and development is already done) could go a long way toward further increases in the use of renewable resources, and there are obviously many other uses for foam that go beyond seats in cars.

There's still the little issue of soy proliferation causing other environmental harm (deforestation, rising food prices, and so forth), but since the main source of the foam is soybean oil (just like biodiesel!) this technology should be easily applicable to any new bio-oil sources in the future, such as algae.

CNN.com just ran this lede:

Dobbs: Lame ducks all in a row

President Bush isn't the only lame duck in our nation's capital. All 435 Congressmen are up for re-election next year, and so are 34 of our senators. That's a total of 469 lame ducks, the way I see it.

Color me confused, but I'm pretty sure the term 'lame-duck' explicitly refers to someone who can not run for re-election, and thus has little concern about consequences of his actions, and similarly has little power in terms of getting his actions done, because those around him can just wait him out. You would think Lou Dobbs, a seasoned political commentator at one of our nation's largest news portals, would know this.

He also apparently can't do math, since his initial comment suggests he wants to group these 469 congresspeople WITH Bush, which would make 470 individuals. A more accurate opening might have discussed "sitting ducks" since that is what the remainder of his crappy "a pox on both your houses!" commentary is about, but that wouldn't have let him try to lump all of congress in with Bush's awful popularity (or lack thereof.)

Yesterday I returned to the neighborhood to discover the entire area without power. The main grocery store remained open with generators providing power to the cash registers, coolers, and just enough lights to give the appearance of a cheap horror flick. Early in the day a cement truck had struck a power pole and made a big mess of the neighborhood, but that was cleaned up quickly and power was restored, only to have 9000+ houses lose power again at about 3:30 pm for an unrelated reason (however, at the time we didn't realize it was an unrelated incident and everyone assumed there were some issues with rewiring the first accident.) Here's the Seattle P-I article about the outage.

The power came back on just before 6 pm for about thirty seconds, followed by an exceptionally loud explosion like a cache of M-80s being detonated all at once and everything going dead once again. I rushed to the back porch expecting to see a transformer on fire, but instead saw a large tree in the thickets smoking with ash fluttering around. Neighbors said they had heard similar noises after two earlier attempts to restore power but no one had identified the source until this time because numerous other trees blocked the view from the street.

Here's the offending tree. That's an approximately 75-foot tall wild cherry tree, which was leaning against three uninsulated high-voltage lines that run down the hillside to the street below. There's no road or pathway there - just lots of briers, raspberries, creeper vines and trees.

You can almost smell the burnt leaves and bark.

About twenty minutes later (after spending a fair bit of time trying to find a phone book to look up the City Light phone number) a utility truck came driving down the street and we were able to wave them down and point out the source of the outage. Read on for lots more pictures about their efforts to get the tree out of the way.

Just received an email via the departmental mailing list:

Dear colleagues,

I am in need of a French press and ultracentrifuge (for about 100 mL at 30,000g). If anybody has these resources, or knows where I could find them I would be very grateful.

I can only guess that he is trying to make the world's most concentrated cup of espresso.

A Sunday stroll through my attempts at a garden in a house with virtually no yard (all images have a much larger version available by clicking on them.)

These two tomatoes were volunteer sprouts that appeared in one of my houseplants at work. I have no idea where the seeds came from or what cultivar they are, but since they started growing indoors in February they are now quite huge and starting to produce. In front of them are two pepper plants (one jalapeño and one cherry bomb) that just started putting out flowers this week.

This is a burpless cucumber. This is my first time trying to grow cukes, and generally they need a lot of space since they grow on long vines. I'm attempting to train them to grow up the deck railing, but as you can see they've got other plans. The first mature produce is nearly ready for harvest (and visible at center right.) Also in the picture at far right is a bay laurel.

Lots more plants in the extended entry...

Jasper hiding in the plants at the helm of the old houseboat - Feb 7, 2006 (click image to enlarge)

This will be the first of an ongoing series on waste in the American consumer culture. I intend to focus on companies and practices which are detrimental, either in terms of producing more waste or leading to a more wasteful consumer lifestyle. Clearly more is at fault here than just the companies involved, but until consumers change their habits companies are not going to adjust their tactics. Also, don't expect that every post in this series will be about huge problems with large corporations - as mentioned in my previous post on waste, every little bit counts, and eventually it adds up.

Today's offender is Discover Card. I've had a credit card through them since 1999. Shortly after the terrorist attacks in 2001, they changed their boring black-and-orange cards to the shiny American flag card pictured below. Never mind that my card's expiration date wasn't for another three years - they sent everyone a new card unsolicited, and instructed you to safely dispose of the old card after activating it. Mind you, the card number was unchanged, so this required you to chop the thick plastic into many small pieces and discard in the trash, in order to prevent someone from stealing your card's information.

They also sent the occasional offer asking if I wanted any additional cards for family members, which I always shredded and recycled since I had no need for that offer. The real kicker, however was when my card actually reached its expiration date and I received this in the mail:

Yes, that's three cards, which all came in the same envelope. Three identical cards. Same number, same name (mine), same expiration date, same CCV code on the back. I called Discover up to ask why they sent me so many cards, and they informed me that "people like to keep the cards in many handy locations, like glove boxes, in their desk at work..." as if this was lip balm or aspirin. I immediately requested that my account be canceled. Suddenly their tone was much more apologetic and assured me that multiple cards must have been some sort of mistake and perhaps I had requested a replacement or duplicate card at some point in the past? Nice try, but too late. There's three cards that won't be getting mailed out yet another time, but who knows how many pointless duplicate cards are out there?

This seems to be a common practice among credit card and cell phone companies - they get to pad their numbers by claiming X million cards (or phone numbers) are in circulation, when in reality only a small fraction of that number is their member base. Sprint actually tried to give me a second cell phone and phone number ("for only $10 more a month!") and when I protested that I didn't need two mobile phones they insisted I could give it to a relative or pet or something. It's an unfortunate tactic that's becoming far too frequent, and people tend to buy into the bull that's shoveled at them during the sell. It's time to tell these companies "Enough!"

Lake Union Fireworks, Seattle, WA - July 4, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

Also, while watching the fireworks I took my 5000th digital photo with my trusty Kodak EasyShare DX4900. Here it is for posterity:

Lady Liberty apparently needs a tissue.

Gasworks Park, Wallingford, Seattle, WA - July 3, 2007 (click image to enlarge)

As promised waaaaay back last week during my first music review, I'm going to discuss the concept of 'Purchase Without Knowing Previous Work', or PWKPW, as I will more likely abbreviate it to save my poor carpals some stress.

Frequently I find myself excited about an upcoming CD release specifically because I already have music by the artist and look forward to their further sonic adventures. This often occurs even when I haven't heard any music off the new album, or at most the single track that has been released early to ferment interest. With a band I haven't heard any other work from, this would probably not be enough to convince me to buy the album (although on commercial radio they probably play that one song enough times in the span of a day to make anyone subconsciously desire the crappy album, but I digress...) In the case of an artist I know and enjoy, the release date is usually marked on my calendar and the next time I visit the record store I grab it.

Usually the album meets or exceeds my expectations, but there are plenty of times where either the album downright sucks or early reviews get couched in terms like "it's going to require careful listening to appreciate." Now don't get me wrong - there are plenty of albums that initially don't sound like anything special, but listening a few times brings out the subtle nuances that the artist has hidden away as a reward for the faithful fan.

This is shaping up to be a very long post, so I'll use the extended entry feature for the first time and continue this below.

I'll start by saying that I haven't read the book that this movie was (apparently loosely) based on. Having seen documentaries on the fast food industry and mega-corporate culture before this, I went in expecting a film that exposed a lot of shocking secrets (well, "secrets" in as much as we probably ignore a lot of things that we're really aware of at some visceral level because it's easy to forget about bad things if you don't see them on a daily basis.)

Instead what came on the screen was a somewhat haphazard and rambling series of interconnected stories, telling the tale of various parts of a fictionalized fast food restaurant. We start with the story of a corporate higher-up (Greg Kinnear) who is sent to investigate reports of problems with contamination at his chain's meat supplier. We then cut to the story of some illegal immigrants crossing a desolate border from Mexico and getting taken to various parts of the country to find work. At this point the movie showed a lot of promise and expectation in terms of giving an important message about how our daily choices can affect many people in different ways.

However, from here we cut to an odd story about a high school girl (Ashley Johnson) working at the register of one of this chain's restaurants, who is dissatisfied with her low-pay dead-end work. Her story was by far the weakest link in the movie, and distracts greatly from the main point about how low prices lead to poor labor conditions beyond the sight of the consumer. It's this which leads to both economic disaster and environmental disaster as companies look to cut as many corners as they can to make an extra dime, be it by relaxing safety standards, paying sub-living-wages, or by ignoring health standards.

The movie jumps from story to story, with no solid resolution in many cases. The issue of poor labor practices with the illegal immigrants is glossed over, with only brief mention made to the lack of reliable health care, low relative pay, poor training & safety standards, and inability to report problems for fear of deportation that these workers face. Likewise, Greg Kinnear's character decides to do the right thing and report to his boss about the problems with the meat packing plant, but by some inexplicable bit of storytelling the person with connections to the plant essentially blackmails him (well, technically his boss, but strangely enough this also jeopardizes his job despite having just successfully developed a huge money-making product for the company.)

As mentioned earlier, by far the weakest part of the storyline follows Ashley Johnson's character, who suffers from a severe infestation of general white-trash-small-town-ism. Her mom (a very scary-looking Patricia Arquette) is basically a 40-going-on-16 skank. She's the prototypical beautiful-yet-mysteriously-unpopular girl at her high school. She hates her job and wants to "do good" and gets caught up with a bunch of the local college greenies, and things progress from there. Strangely, in a movie that's apparently trying to tell lots of sad moralistic tales about how people get forced to conform and fall into roles, she manages to do everything against the grain, yet gets off scot-free at the end.

In summary, you'd be better off reading The Jungle (meet the new century, same as the old century), read the book version of Fast Food Nation (which Kristin tells me is much more focused on the activist aspect of the woes barely touched on in the movie version), or visit your local meatpacking plant. This doesn't do any of them proper justice.

Rating: 6 out of 10 Big Macs.

Barnacles and seaweed on beach steps, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA - July 1, 2007 (click image to enlarge)