randomness

I Can Haz Ferry Ride!

Dana Hunter1 Comment

Regulars know I’ve been playing a-plenty this summer, and it’s standard cantina policy to provide vicarious experiences. So you all get to go on my first ferry ride with me.

I know, pathetic, right? I mean, ferry virginhood was acceptable when I lived in Arizona, but I’ve lived here in Seattle for over two years now. I’ve visited Rocky Point and San Diego. Yet I’ve never sailed the sea – until today. We took the ferry over to Bremerton, and while it’s not open ocean, it’s still traveling over salt water, damn it.


See, look – that’s Elliot Bay behind me. Salt water. Not fresh.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen Seattle from the water rather than merely across it:


Woot!

The seagulls follow the ferry. We had a whole flock of them hanging in the air above us – a neat trick:


I soon discovered why they hover:


Yes, if you hold up bits of food, they will swoop down and take it right out of your fingers. Now, mind you, we’re going pretty fast, so they don’t have time for fine-tuning – and judging from the reactions of various seagull feeders, the little buggers just grab everything within beak range. So if you attempt this trick, make sure you don’t mind looking like Rahm Emmanuel, since you could end up flipping people off with a finger that’s no longer present.

The ferry has to run a gauntlet of islands to get to Bremerton. Here you can see a few of them complete with the Olympics rising like mirages in the background:

And trust me when I say this is an utterly awesome sight. But don’t let it distract you from the jellies – they were thick in the water, floating past just under the water where they couldn’t be photographed but could definitely be marveled at. Some of them were huge, compared to the usual run of jellies I see up here.

Bremerton’s the proud home of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, and you can usually see an aircraft carrier or two in for repairs. Here’s the shipyard – if your eyes are sharp enough, you can probably sort the carrier out from the clutter:


When the ferry docks, be sure to visit the Harborside Fountain Park right nearby. It’s got fountains, believe it or not:


Great big fountains that go boom. If you’ve got your wading clothes on, you can jump in the water and get splashed, which is an excellent idea on a hot day. I salute the city planners who came up with this idea. And I adore them for including a bunch of half-polished and very interesting boulders. The geology buff in me melted. It’s neat to be able to see part of a rock polished and the other part in its natural state. And they really fascinated me with the polished conglomerate:

The bottom right’s the polished bit, the upper left the unpolished, and you can see how it’s all a bunch of rubble in a stone matrix. Intriguing. Well, to a rock hound, it is. And there’s more! I won’t torture you with them until I do a Sunday Sensational Science about rocks, though.

As you walk up from the Harborside Fountain Park, don’t forget to check out the arse end of a submarine (I think it’s the arse end, anyway) and the bit of a something-or-other on display in front of the ship yard:


Why, yes, my father was Army. However did you guess?

Speaking of Vietnam, th
e USS Turner Joy is open for tours – unless, of course, you get there after they close:


Alas, all good things must come to an end. After a long walk around the marina and stumbling into a wedding in Harborside Fountains Park on the way back, it’s time to get back home. Here’s our ride:


On the way into Elliot Bay, I saw this pigeon flying way out in the middle of this big ol’ expanse of water. I wondered if he’d make it back to dry land before his wings gave out. Silly me:

And here I thought passenger pigeons were extinct.

In Seattle, there’s always one sure way to tell you’re home:


There’s no other skyline like it in the world.

I Can Haz Ferry Ride!
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Mah Excuses

Dana Hunter1 Comment

If we’re very fortunate, this week’s Sunday Sensational Science will be all about botany. It was supposed to be about the geology of the Wupatki region, but, well, you see, the cat got involved…


It’s a large book with glossy pages, and she thinks I purchased it for her comfort rather than our edification.

All right, so the fact that the Colorado Plateau has a complicated history also has something to do with it. Whereas plants are dead easy. So botany it shall be – as long as the cat doesn’t get Ideas.

I wouldn’t put it past her. Every day, I come home at lunch intending to get some reading done, and every day, I end up on the floor playing hair tie instead:


I mean, really, how am I supposed to resist something so cute and homicidal?

Mah Excuses

Out and About in Seattle

Dana Hunter1 Comment

As most of you know by now, I’ve decided to punk off this summer and play. Well, mostly play. There’s my job (I love my job. I love my job. Really, I love my job). There’s blogging (don’t have to repeat a mantra here – I actually do love blogging). There’s the general stuff and nonsense we all have to do in order to keep the daily grind grinding. But on Fridays, I flip all that stuff the finger and go esplore.

Last Friday, we were at Alki Beach, and I finally got a picture of myself with the gorgeous Seattle skyline:


And an awesome silhouette of the Olympic Mountains:


Then we went for dinner, and nearly had a hot air balloon land atop us in Woodinville:


Unfortunately, it had already passed overhead by the time we dug the camera out. It’s the closest I’ve seen a balloon since one landed in our horse pasture when I was a kid.

This Friday, we headed out to my old stomping grounds at Juanita Bay Park. It seems having large flying objects nearly behead my buddy are going to be a common occurrence, because he nearly got his noggin taken off by a great blue heron. The little fucker chose a moment when both cameras were otherwise occupied to make his entrance, so we didn’t get the awesome “ZOMG this heron’s gonna hit me!” shot. But we did get some good photo ops afterward.

The silhouette:

The closeup:


The “hey, the little fucker’s flying again!”

It’s times like this I wish I’d bought a better camera.

There was even a beaver out eating, and we did manage to catch his head popping up through the water after a dive, but good luck telling him from the lilies. I won’t make you strain your eyes.

Gallivanting’s wonderful and all, but it’s still nice to come home, where the raging bundle of hostility that is my cat sometimes likes to prove that she really does love her mommy:


Either that, or she was cold.

My friend’s got himself some panorama software, and he knows how to use it. Click to enjoy the fruits of his labor:


That’s mah citeh. Isn’t she luverly?

Out and About in Seattle

Random Vacation Photo: Weeds

Dana Hunter1 Comment
Prickly Pear and Sinagua ruins at Montezuma’s Well

Barrel Cactus at Tuzigoot

My ex-step aunt moved to the Seattle area for a few years. One day, the neighbor found her busily digging up ferns in the vacant lot near their houses. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to line the driveway with ferns.”

“But- but those are weeds.”

My aunt burst out laughing. “In Arizona, those are worth a lot of money. Let me show you something.” She led him over to his bay window and pointed to the shelves full of lovingly-cultivated cacti, which he’d spent a small fortune on. “Where I come from, those are weeds.”

All a matter of perspective, innit?

Random Vacation Photo: Weeds

Genealogy of a Dream

Dana Hunter

You will shortly understand the reason for this illustration:


Tonight, for the first time all week, my cat did not shove her dear little face into mine whilst howling, or use the bed as a trampoline, or do any of the other things designed to wake Mommy up from her nap because Kitteh wants to go hang out on the porch. This allowed me to dream. I dreamt of Edward (is that his name?) from Twilight.

Now, ordinarily, this would have been a traumatic experience. I haven’t read the books or seen the movies, but heard just enough to realize that reading the books or seeing the movies would induce terminal vomiting. However. This dream answered an important question: why the fuck would a vampire want to afflict himself with perpetual high school?

Enter Desmonda. I’m not sure what she was. Some kind of immortal, not a vampire, who as a tween (apparently before becoming immortal, or discovering she was immortal, or whatthefuckever) had been taken in by Edward during a runaway episode. Apparently, he raised her right. The dream opened with her, and she was h-h-hot and Einstein-smart. Picture her, dressed in skin-tight jeans and some sassy red shirt, purse flung casually over her shoulder, dark hair flowing, and striding up the sidewalk with an attitude destined to leave you awestruck. K? Got her envisioned?

She was going back to high school.

She was posing as a teenager specificially so she could go back to high school.

And my brain supplied the backstory: she was posing as a teenager so she could go back to high school in order to make being a nerd so irresistably sexy, so unutterably cool, that all the kids would of course strive to become nerds themselves. She was going to influence a generation to believe brains = beauty (which they do, but how many kids believe that?). And she wasn’t just preaching it to the kids, because we all know that talking to teens is rather like telling your cat to go play trampoline somewhere else.

Desmonda meets Edward coming up the sidewalk near the school from the other direction, and lo, he has independently reached the same conclusion. He, too, is returning to high school in order to make nerd the ideal every teen wishes to attain. And I can guarantee you that reason for endless high school is so much more awesome than whatever excuse Stephanie Meyer cooked up that they can only be fit onto one graph if one uses a logarithmic scale.

I may have to write this as a fan-fic story someday, just for shits and giggles. It delighted me. It puzzled me for a moment – I mean, WTF? But then I discovered the genealogy of the dream.

My friend Raji at work had been yammering about having to get New Moon soon, which made me want to cry. I can’t believe so many of my friends are so tragically coming down with this Twilight disease.

And the second element was PZ’s post, in which he immolates Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s vapid new book, then lights a thousand candles from the flames:

In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It’s a process carried out by human beings, and it can’t be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn’t rock the boat. Imagine they’d written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn’t challenge the culture; we’d laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don’t get it.

Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan’s great magic trick was that he didn’t make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they’re wrong. Sagan’s great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of “billyuns and billyuns”, but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.

[snip]

Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn’t hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you’ll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.

Thus you have Edward and Desmonda, headed back to high school to turn science into chic.

Genealogy of a Dream

The Imminent Return of Sunday Sensational Science

Dana Hunter

I’m hard at work on quite a few Sunday Sensational Science posts at the moment, all springing from my recent trip back home. Arizona’s got lotsa science. And most of it is stuff that I could whip up something off-the-cuff for, since I’ve got plenty o’ Arizona science facts rattling around in my brainpan. But I decided I want to go in-depth. I want to take the opportunity to learn more than I knew before. And there’s one billion or so photos to sort through. So, nothing sensational just yet.

In the meantime, let me point you to a few posts that aren’t science at all, but were interesting nonetheless, and at least contain elements that kinda sorta resemble science.

There’s Vagabond Scholar’s Diagrams of Conservatism, helping us “Visualize the Insanity:”


It’s actually an interesting discussion, not just a lot of snarky diagrams.

For the one or two of you who don’t read Pharyngula, I’d just like to point out his discussion about atheists and society:

There is a strange correlation: most of the atheists I know are straight, yet when I post a pointless poll like this one, I know with near certainty which way the godless hordes of Pharyngula will try to skew it.

Do you agree with President Obama’s decision to extend certain benefits to gay partners of federal employees?

51.38% Yes
48.62% No

It goes further, too. We atheists tend to strongly favor women’s rights and equality in the marketplace, yet only about half of us are female. I could bring up an article like this one, in which conservative democrats demand that abortion services not be provided under universal healthcare, and I know how most of the progressive godless readers here will respond: with anger.

And he’s right. The yes votes currently stand at 93%. I imagine our concern for social justice is just one of the many reasons religious right frothers hate us so.

For those of you wondering what that recent spike in gas prices was all about, here’s a possible answer:

A rogue oil commodities broker was caught manipulating a spike in world oil prices forcing his company to eat $10 million in losses. The disclosure occurred Tuesday when the price of crude oil reached a year’s high $73.50 a barrel at a time when the U.S. posts its highest demand on gasoline for the summer vacation season. By Thursday oil prices fell to $66.50 a barrel, down almost 10 per cent from Tuesday’s peak.

As that post points out, this isn’t the first time we’ve been shafted like this.

For those of you wondering what the “science” element was in that last one, well, economics is a science.

And that’s just about enough for a holiday weekend.

The Imminent Return of Sunday Sensational Science

My Bebbe's First Fourth

Dana Hunter

The little girl’s in bloom, and this morning, she also had a perfect little drop of water dangling from one of her leaves. So I figured it was time to assault you with yet more photos of the fuchsias:


And that’s all I shall subject you to until they’ve grown up a bit. According to the tags, some of these buggers can reach six feet in height. Deary, deary me. They grow up so fast…

My Bebbe's First Fourth

Mah New Bebbes!

Dana Hunter1 Comment

I woke up haunted by the memory of the fuchsia plant I’d left behind. Y’see, the Arboretum gift shop was closed when we went yesterday, but they still had the Arboretum-grown plants sitting outside, and there was this Starry Trail fuchsia that gave me the puppy-dog eyes (metaphorically speaking). He was still there when I went back! And here’s my beautiful baby:

Of course, I couldn’t condemn him to a life as an only child (although my cat and I don’t mind our status). So I chose him a sister, a cute little Madame Cornelissen:


I’ll have better pictures of them once they’re a little older and the wind isn’t blowing. I’m sure you’re all beside yourselves with excitement.

One of the most thrilling things about moving to the Northwest for me was the potential of having surviving fuchsias. I’ve always loved them, but they don’t love Arizona, alas. Now I have a baker’s rack full o’ em, and I anticipate many happy years watching them grow. Maybe they’ll even give me grandbebbes.

I didn’t just spend my day chasing plants. I made the mistake of passing by Half-Price Books in Redmond whilst on my way to the hobby shop in a fruitless search for a home for the rock collection. Did I say passed by? I meant that only in a temporary sense. Book stores are like black holes for me, especially book stores where books can be had for cheap. This one turns out to be two stories. And they have a ginormous science section. Did I say ginormous? I meant that only in a temporary sense. It’s rather smaller now that I’ve been through it…

Mah New Bebbes!

Summer's For Playing Outside

Dana Hunter

I’ve decided to take this summer (mostly) off. I barely caught a glimpse of sunshine last year – too busy between the blog and regular writing to get me arse outside. Not this year. The season’s too short for that shit. I’ll lock myself away in happy hermittude this winter, when I have longer nights to write in anyway.

So today, I escaped to Ravenna Park, which is one of my favorite Seattle city parks ever. It’s fairly large as such things go, set deep in a ravine in the U-District, with a stream running through it.


Looks peaceful, doesn’t it just? And look, it’s got side-streams with waterfalls and everything:


There’s a pond with goldfish, too:


Then, as you come back down the trail, you can cross the stream at my utterly favorite part, where there’s a bridge and an enormous boulder:


To prove to you how much I love this boulder, I’ll show you a picture of me sitting upon it two years ago:


It’s my Zen boulder. It’s a good old friend.

Since Ravenna doesn’t take long to hike, we decided to head down to the Washington Park Arboretum after a refueling stop at Johnny Rocket’s. It was because I’d seen these guys blooming on our way over the 520 bridge, and I knew just the place to see ’em up close:


The Arboretum maintains a trail that crosses the western tip of Lake Washington, crossing a few of the islands, and ending up at the ship canal. It’s a gorgeous, easy walk. You get to stroll on top of the water for a little bit there, and on a clear day, you can even see the Cascades waaay in the distance:


Those aren’t clouds atop the treeline – that’s snowcapped peaks, that is.

The islands are so low that your feet squelch on the path, and there’s standing water full of itty bitty sprouting plants to both sides, turning the spaces between the tree trunks a glorious green:

Then you get to the Ship Canal, where you can watch the boats go by and read the silly things UW students paint on the canal walls, or turn around and gaze across the lake at the mountains. It’s hard to choose:


If you walk alongside the Canal, you get to pass right under the drawbridge on Montlake Blvd.


In fact, you can look up and watch the cars passing overhead:


Yup, you can see the cars through the roadway. Freaky-neat, eh?

If you prefer, though, you can hurry through that bit and just go look at Montlake through a tree bough:

And then, if you’re reaaalllly lucky, you might catch sight of a blue heron fishing on your way back:


He’s in the tall grass almost dead-center there. And if you think he’s hard to spot in this one, ask to see the ones I took where he’s standing straight up, all tall and thin, instead of hunched over getting ready to fish.

Lotta miles of walking we did, all out in the bright warm sun. And then we stuffed ourselves into a refrigerated theater to watch Star Trek. I wasn’t even disappointed there wasn’t much story to it, because the action sorta sketched a story out. The most amusing thing is the use of tired old comic book conventions to restart continuity. I probably should’ve been upset, but it made me giggle. So did Spock Prime.

If you haven’t seen the movie, do it before you miss the chance to see it on the big screen. And if you’ve never seen Lake Washington and Ravenna Park, well, you know how to get hold of me, and I do have room for a guest or two. But you’d best hurry. Summer doesn’t last long.

Carpe aestas while you’ve got the chance…

Summer's For Playing Outside

Things You Should Never Try At Home

Dana Hunter


I’ve been clearing out the DVR whilst catching up on household chores and framing the various bits of art I picked up during my vacation. It’s hard to fast-forward through commercials when your hands are full. Usually, I pay no attention to the blather, but it’s a little hard to ignore a scuba-diving cat.

If you watch teevee, you might have seen that ad for HowStuffWorks.com. There’s some dude steering a cat in diving gear around a pool. I know that people do bizarre things, but this is the first time I’ve seen a man retain his hand after dumping a feline in several thousand gallons of water. It caught my interest. And in these days of the intertoobz, I could find out if this was clever CGI or true insanity.

Turns out the cat really does dive:

So what does Hawkeye do when she’s scuba diving? Sometimes she bounds around along the pool’s bottom like Neil Armstrong on the moon’s surface. She hasn’t quite figured out how to swim underwater, even though she’s a proficient surface swimmer. This is where Alba comes in. He’ll typically hold Hawkeye’s tank and lead her around the pool while she hangs around, checking everything out. According to Alba, scuba diving relaxes her — the weightlessness of being underwater could be a welcome change from the gravity-bound shackles of dry land.

Apparently, since the commercial came out, people have been requesting scuba gear for their cats. I won’t be among them. Granted, my rotund little beastie could use the exercise, but I value my limbs. I do not want to have to explain to curious members of the public just how I became a multiple amputee.

Besides, Hawkeye’s owner isn’t honoring requests for kitty scuba outfits. He knows the vast majority of cats wouldn’t appreciate the opportunity to obtain a fish-eye view of the world. He only ever stuck his cat in scuba gear because she started swimming on her own.

It just goes to show there’s an oddball in every bunch, dunnit?

For those of you who haven’t overdosed on cute lately, watch and aw:

Things You Should Never Try At Home