Daily Archives: February 27, 2010

Art and Culture, Dogs, GeekWorld

The Grand Tour

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

Met the Grout Doctor today.  Turns out he wears a yellow weatherproof  jacket, very new jeans and rubber duckies.  Allan came by to give us an estimate on what it would take to rehabilitate some aching tiles and bring that new installation gleam back to the steam bath.  More than I’d imagined, but less than we were willing to pay, so Allan will return on Thursday to get started.  Gonna give the whole shebang an acid bath.  Sounds very Hannibal Lecter to me.

Fiddled with the new Panasonic camera we got today, too.  The number of things it can do amaze me.  It can focus on an object and then retain focus on that object as it moves.  How can it do that?  If you turn a little switch, it will shoot HD quality video using any of the settings it has for still photography.  How can do it that?  The twelve megapixels it shoots my buddy Jim Johnson tells me is just at the minimal range of what magazines expect in photos.  Well, at least the camera’s good enough for the pro mags.  I haven’t shot any images with it yet.  I want to devote a day or so to using all the various gadgets, learn how it performs.

Also put together an 8 object tour for next Friday, the public tour  Highlights:  Art from 1600-1850.  My theme is the Grand Tour, which was popular in that time frame.  In my Grand Tour though we will visit all but the Australian continent, while retaining the traditional focus on European art of France, Italy and the Low Countries.  I’ve begun to use the new Grove Dictionary of Art.  It has depth and breadth.  It taught me today about the Grand Tour and the various phases through which it passed before finally dying out as the middle-class began to travel more.  Just wasn’t the same with all those shopkeepers in the Uffizi.

Put in more words to the Unmaking.  I’m close to the middle, maybe a bit passed it.  We’ll see how it is after I finish and it sits on the shelf for a while.  Then I’ll have a better view of it.  Right now it’s so close to me, I can’t tell anything.

And Vega came inside limping tonight.  Limping makes us take deep breaths, because it can mean the onset of cancer, has meant the onset of cancer in at least three of our dogs.  On the other hand it might be an injury.  We hope.

Great Work

Terremoto

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Imbolc                                       Full Wild Moon

Earthquakes.  Great and terrible.  They fascinate me, as do volcanoes and tsunami.

As you look at this scale, notice that it goes up logarithmically, not geometrically.  An 8.5 is 5 billion tons of tnt while a 9.0, only .5 higher on the scale is 32 billion tons.)

Here’s a good Richter scale comparison:

Richter     TNT for Seismic    Example
Magnitude      Energy Yield    (approximate)

-1.5                6 ounces   Breaking a rock on a lab table
1.0               30 pounds   Large Blast at a Construction Site
1.5              320 pounds
2.0                1 ton      Large Quarry or Mine Blast
2.5              4.6 tons
3.0               29 tons
3.5               73 tons
4.0            1,000 tons     Small Nuclear Weapon
4.5            5,100 tons     Average Tornado (total energy)
5.0           32,000 tons
5.5           80,000 tons     Little Skull Mtn., NV Quake, 1992
6.0        1 million tons     Double Spring Flat, NV Quake, 1994
6.5        5 million tons     Northridge, CA Quake, 1994
7.0       32 million tons     Hyogo-Ken Nanbu, Japan Quake, 1995; Largest Thermonuclear Weapon
7.5      160 million tons     Landers, CA Quake, 1992
8.0        1 billion tons     San Francisco, CA Quake, 1906
8.5        5 billion tons     Anchorage, AK Quake, 1964
9.0       32 billion tons     Chilean Quake, 1960
10.0       1 trillion tons     (San-Andreas type fault circling Earth)
12.0     160 trillion tons     (Fault Earth in half through center,
OR Earth’s daily receipt of solar energy)
Plus there is the tsunami:

The following was a report from today.  Can you imagine what must have been going through their minds, given the devastation from the 1960 tsunami?

In Hawaii, water began pulling away from shore off Hilo Bay on the Big Island just before noon, exposing reefs and sending dark streaks of muddy, sandy water offshore. Waves later washed over Coconut Island, a small park off Hilo’s coast.

The tsunami caused a series of surges that were about 20 minutes apart, and the waves arrived later and smaller than originally predicted. The highest wave at Hilo measured 5.5 feet (1.7 meters) high, while Maui saw some as high as 2 meters (6.5 feet).

Weather +Climate

Potholes. Puddles. Slush. Oh, Boy.

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610temp_new

Imbolc                                       Full Wild Moon

March will come in under a full Wild Moon.  It will also come in gently, according to the weather reports.  It will not, however, be all calm and sunshine.  March is a transition month here in the North Country, one that can swing from melting snow to blizzards and high drifts.

Right now this graphic from the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA suggests an above average chance for above average temperatures over the next 6-10 days.  Puddles.  Potholes.  Slush.

Stay tuned though.  March has moods and they can swing under a full Wild Moon.