Monday, July 11, 2011
Talk to the Hand
Some more progress on Mr. Hand. Got a finger to move under its own power, sorta. But have to wait for materials from far flung parts of the USofA in order to figure out the wrist motion before I can complete the assembly and discover that it isn't going to actually work right.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Pie in the Sky
Ended up on the wrong end of a coconut creme pie at a birthday party yesterday:
But not as bad as Bill Gates:
And a better outcome too:
But not as bad as Bill Gates:
Friday, July 8, 2011
Not Nopera
Went to see Faust at the S.Fe Opera on Weds night. Did the sushi-tailgate thing aforehand, and then carried through with actually going to the performance rather than No-pera-ing it. They pulled out most of the stops on this one and even included the "ballet" section at the end which was originally added because the French had to have dancing girls somewhere in any show they attended. This made the whole thing last over three (3!) hours which was about an hour too long for the boy-meets-devil-meets-girl-loses-everything story. But fun anyway.
One interesting bit in the staging makes me wonder exactly who is tweaking whom. In the Marguerite-goes-to-church scene, Mephistopheles is the priest playing the organ. She takes her baby into the confessional and ole-Meph sets up in the ajoining compartment. He slowly creeps through the screen between the sections and pulls the baby out of her arms. Then the entire congregation turns out to be wearing red demon masks. It's incredibly creepy good... But... Is this little bit of stage-craft specified in the original or left to the reader? It basically sets up the Catholic Church as the Great Satan. If it is original I would more expect it from the Protestant Germans, not the Catholic French. If it's Santa Fe's Own, then maybe the local catholic population is too poor to attend the opera? Considering the brouhaha over the topless angel Guadalupe collage at the Folk Museum a few years ago you'd think someone would notice.
Two thumbs up. M-bob says check it out at SRO prices.
One interesting bit in the staging makes me wonder exactly who is tweaking whom. In the Marguerite-goes-to-church scene, Mephistopheles is the priest playing the organ. She takes her baby into the confessional and ole-Meph sets up in the ajoining compartment. He slowly creeps through the screen between the sections and pulls the baby out of her arms. Then the entire congregation turns out to be wearing red demon masks. It's incredibly creepy good... But... Is this little bit of stage-craft specified in the original or left to the reader? It basically sets up the Catholic Church as the Great Satan. If it is original I would more expect it from the Protestant Germans, not the Catholic French. If it's Santa Fe's Own, then maybe the local catholic population is too poor to attend the opera? Considering the brouhaha over the topless angel Guadalupe collage at the Folk Museum a few years ago you'd think someone would notice.
Two thumbs up. M-bob says check it out at SRO prices.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
More Fire Stuff
Tom Ashcraft over at heliotown.com sent me this time-lapse video from the first night of the Las Conches fire. It's from just east of Eldroado (a few miles down the road from me) and he says it was shot with a standard lens -- not a telephoto -- but it seems up pretty close when compared to my previously posted deck photos. I musta missed the big overture...
And now for something completely...
Well, probably not different but at least not fire related...
I'm making a robot hand out of copper pipe. As is typical for Santa Fe I had to import a good portion of the art supplies from elsewhere -- We have a metal recycler and a couple of construction materials vendors here, but they don't really provide the level of supply to which I had become accustomed.
Here's some fingers:
The palm portion is in process as we speak. I will probably stall out after I get it assembled, but the idea is to have it articulate on an arm so you can shake hands with a robot. It would have a people detector and a speach synth to try to get folks to cooperate and berate them when they don't. I should do it with Arduinos and MaxMSP but I think I'm just too stupid to learn how, so I'll probably re-invent it all for myself.
I'm making a robot hand out of copper pipe. As is typical for Santa Fe I had to import a good portion of the art supplies from elsewhere -- We have a metal recycler and a couple of construction materials vendors here, but they don't really provide the level of supply to which I had become accustomed.
Here's some fingers:
The palm portion is in process as we speak. I will probably stall out after I get it assembled, but the idea is to have it articulate on an arm so you can shake hands with a robot. It would have a people detector and a speach synth to try to get folks to cooperate and berate them when they don't. I should do it with Arduinos and MaxMSP but I think I'm just too stupid to learn how, so I'll probably re-invent it all for myself.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
All Along the Watchtower
Last night everyone in the greater Santa Fe area had a devilish view of three or four Las Conches ridgelines happily burning away. One way to the south above Cochiti and the others behind and above Los Alamos. That and concentrated fire-truck patrols seems to have put a damper on private aerial fireworks displays down here, so we had no real incidents with which to deal -- in my district, Hondo, the guys mostly drove around to get different and better views of the burning ridges to the west. There was apparently one rough moment elsewhere in the county when an off duty State Police Personage refused to stop celebrating -- who do you call then, the FBI?
Anyway here's today's map showing growth to the north. Some theories have it running until it gets to Abiquiu, quite a bit further north. And, based on yesterday's personal communications, it is also still burning down the canyons of Santa Clara, destroying most of the watershed for the Pueblo. Hopefully they will be able to recover in a timely manner:
Here is a map from the night of July 3rd which shows the daily size increase. Very impressive:
Anyway here's today's map showing growth to the north. Some theories have it running until it gets to Abiquiu, quite a bit further north. And, based on yesterday's personal communications, it is also still burning down the canyons of Santa Clara, destroying most of the watershed for the Pueblo. Hopefully they will be able to recover in a timely manner:
Here is a map from the night of July 3rd which shows the daily size increase. Very impressive:
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Pacheco Fire -- the ignored eldest child
So what's happened to the Pacheco Fire during all this excitement about Las Conches? Fortunately not much of the bad type...it seems to be fairly contained and -- weather willing -- not spreading. Incident Command is being transferred to local authorities which means that it's mostly grunt work, a LOT of grunt work, left to do. I found this June 26 satellite image of the two fires on NASA's Earth Observatory. I didn't realize that they are directly across the Rio Grande from each other:
(NASA doesn't seem to put images on this site in a timely manner so you can't use it to track reality, but they are instructive none-the-less).
Getting back to Las Conches, it too seems to be in the wind-down phase. No fat ladies are singing (outside of the opera house) yet, but Los Alamos and LANL are off evacuation notice. Yesterday an actual good map was posted and I grabbed a copy in case it got disappeared. Unfortunately it's embeded in a pdf document as small strips of image so you'll just have to download it and look at it as best you can: http://www.etantdonnes.com/HVFD/image/lasconches_ftp-20110701-153027.pdf. By comparing that map to the usual-schmutzy one from July 2 23:00 posted this morning you can get an idea of what's been affected and where -- it is hoped -- it will all end:
A number of people have asked me, "How come they don't just fill up every airplane and drown the thing right away?" The problem is, you can't get enough water in the air to have any real effect. Let's just say that it would take a storm dumping 1" of rain in an hour to knock-down a square-mile of burning forest -- I'm just grabbing those numbers out of an orifice, but I think they're in the right ballpark. That storm would deliver around 18 million gallons of water. Most firefighting air tankers carry 3000 gallons or less, so you would need to execute 6000 drops in an hour to have the same effect. Thus air drops are generally used on small spot fires or to create containment lines with retardant.
Which brings me to a small lecture on wildfire fighting. The Fire Tetrahedron shows that you need four things for a fire to burn: Air, Fuel, Heat, and Chemistry. To stop the fire you need to interrupt continuity in one or more of those. For a structure fire you have a failrly well contained but very hot fire. You can deliver 10 or 20,000 gallons of water in an hour and basically drown it -- the water cools it off and to some extent limits the fuel's access to air. In a big wildland fire there's no way to cool it off, so the only thing you can do is limit it's access to fuel. This is called "cutting line" around the fire. We have to make a break in the continuity of fuel using natural barriers like ridge-tops and rivers as well as man-made roads, bull-dozed strips, and, very often, hand-dug trenches.
The three things of interest in a widlfire are: Fuel, Weather, and Topology. With heavy fuels -- big trees with jungle-like understory -- it's very hard to break the continuity. Windy, especially hot and dry, weather drives the fire and causes "spotting" -- embers blown far from the fire front which ignite new "spot fires" that can expand and spot some more. Rough terrain makes it very hard to access to cut-line and, since fire likes to travel up, the second worst place to be (the worst being IN the fire) is up-wind and up-hill -- which is exactly where you need to be in order to stop the main fire's progress and knock out those small spot fires. That's why these things take so long to get under control.
For Las Conches, it looks like really concentrated work saved the Pajarito Ski lodge buildings and, with some added weather luck, kept the fire from spreading into inhabited parts of Los Alamos. But that's using over 1000 people on only a small part of the fire-line.
Personal interest aside: I grew up near the SoCal air tanker base which this guy visited: Cal Fire Airtankers at Hemet-Ryan,CA so I well remember them flying overhead all day long during the summer.
link
(NASA doesn't seem to put images on this site in a timely manner so you can't use it to track reality, but they are instructive none-the-less).
Getting back to Las Conches, it too seems to be in the wind-down phase. No fat ladies are singing (outside of the opera house) yet, but Los Alamos and LANL are off evacuation notice. Yesterday an actual good map was posted and I grabbed a copy in case it got disappeared. Unfortunately it's embeded in a pdf document as small strips of image so you'll just have to download it and look at it as best you can: http://www.etantdonnes.com/HVFD/image/lasconches_ftp-20110701-153027.pdf. By comparing that map to the usual-schmutzy one from July 2 23:00 posted this morning you can get an idea of what's been affected and where -- it is hoped -- it will all end:
A Little Exegesis
A number of people have asked me, "How come they don't just fill up every airplane and drown the thing right away?" The problem is, you can't get enough water in the air to have any real effect. Let's just say that it would take a storm dumping 1" of rain in an hour to knock-down a square-mile of burning forest -- I'm just grabbing those numbers out of an orifice, but I think they're in the right ballpark. That storm would deliver around 18 million gallons of water. Most firefighting air tankers carry 3000 gallons or less, so you would need to execute 6000 drops in an hour to have the same effect. Thus air drops are generally used on small spot fires or to create containment lines with retardant.
Which brings me to a small lecture on wildfire fighting. The Fire Tetrahedron shows that you need four things for a fire to burn: Air, Fuel, Heat, and Chemistry. To stop the fire you need to interrupt continuity in one or more of those. For a structure fire you have a failrly well contained but very hot fire. You can deliver 10 or 20,000 gallons of water in an hour and basically drown it -- the water cools it off and to some extent limits the fuel's access to air. In a big wildland fire there's no way to cool it off, so the only thing you can do is limit it's access to fuel. This is called "cutting line" around the fire. We have to make a break in the continuity of fuel using natural barriers like ridge-tops and rivers as well as man-made roads, bull-dozed strips, and, very often, hand-dug trenches.
The three things of interest in a widlfire are: Fuel, Weather, and Topology. With heavy fuels -- big trees with jungle-like understory -- it's very hard to break the continuity. Windy, especially hot and dry, weather drives the fire and causes "spotting" -- embers blown far from the fire front which ignite new "spot fires" that can expand and spot some more. Rough terrain makes it very hard to access to cut-line and, since fire likes to travel up, the second worst place to be (the worst being IN the fire) is up-wind and up-hill -- which is exactly where you need to be in order to stop the main fire's progress and knock out those small spot fires. That's why these things take so long to get under control.
For Las Conches, it looks like really concentrated work saved the Pajarito Ski lodge buildings and, with some added weather luck, kept the fire from spreading into inhabited parts of Los Alamos. But that's using over 1000 people on only a small part of the fire-line.
Personal interest aside: I grew up near the SoCal air tanker base which this guy visited: Cal Fire Airtankers at Hemet-Ryan,CA so I well remember them flying overhead all day long during the summer.
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