Undisclosed Location

Big storm. Tree down where I originally parked last evening, but I moved my car into better shade. Power out. Fire alarm (luckily false, because the fire department too a long time to show). Hot. Eventually, too hot.

Fled the state in search of an internet connection and juice, yes, the precious juice. Hoping things have been restored by this evening. Enjoy your leap second tonight.

Kind of a Drag

Cloudy, with almost no chance of Venus, ended up being the weather yesterday. I did manage a glimpse through a telescope, during one of the brief interludes when the clouds thinned. I also snapped this, with my transit/eclipse glasses covering my iPad camera lens

A somewhat pixelated Venus might be that dark blotch in the upper left, just inside the rim. Maybe. It was taken about the right time for it to be there, I think. But it might just be part of the cloud.

We had an OK turnout and it was fun talking to people, play with some of the other kids and I even got a chance to tour our 26″ telescope, which I had not previously visited.

I Grow More Powerful

SMBC: Grace Hopper

For the record, RADM (which was Commodore, at the time) Grace Hopper gave the commencement speech when I graduated. I was in the navy, though not yet commissioned, and I took Hopper’s famous “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission” as a direct order.

We Now Return You to Your Regularly Scheduled Program

I’m back from my jaunt down to Augusta, GA. I had a good time talking with the faculty and students and my talk was well-received — I got some really good questions from the students and even the biology folks said they understood most of it (I may have lost them temporarily when I talked about the guts of atomic clocks, such as the mention of Zeeman splitting of atomic sublevels). The room was reasonably full, too — maybe 60-70 people. The only real glitch was the previously mentioned swapping of NRL for USNO. If I had had time to add a slide to the talk I would have put up a map showing the geographical difference in our locations, and then say how wonderful it is to be in South Carolina (which, like NRL, is right across the river), but I instead opted to mildly embarrass my navy buddy by calling him Ensign and telling about calling up the USNO Master Clock voice announcer. But I kid because I love, and I think he’s done a great job in helping to build up the physics program there and I had a wonderful time visiting with some old friends. Back to regular blogging soon!

Status Update

I’m back from ScienceOnline 2012, which was great, and am now in detox recovery mode. Catching up on things, including sleep — being “up” all day and part of the night, because of all the interesting discussions, is tiring, but it’s a good kind of tired. I expect this will leave me energized in the way I was last year once I get my bearings again. I intend to write up my thoughts on the conference as I did last year. I also have photos to edit and upload from a visit to the JC Raulston Arboretum.

Spear and Magic Helmet?

I had a strange experience while I was out geocaching this past weekend. I thought I heard a boombox and figured I was close to a picnic area, but when I went around a bend in the trail, I discovered it was just a guy singing opera as he walked along. I didn’t recognize it.

I don’t think he had a bad voice or anything, but it’s not the experience I’m looking (or listening) for when I hit the trails.

Set Condition Plaid

As if this week weren’t eventful enough, we now have Irene bearing down on us. People at work who know what they are doing have been battening down the hatches or whatever the shore equivalent is, and I’ve been staying out of their way. Hannah got us wet but not much else (as far as I recall) in 2008 and Isabel knocked out power when she visited in 2003 (24 hours or so for me, longer for others) and came ashore as a cat 1, so this may be more of a problem. Just a heads up that I might submerge and go silent this weekend, if such circumstances are thrust upon me. I’ll have battery power for my iPod and flashlights and sandwich fixins, plus some books to read in case the power and/or internet are interrupted.

Aftermath

Really it’s afterquake; I’m not sure how much math will be here. But anyway, a few more comments on what happened, just because.

An event such as this allows for an evaluation of systems and protocols that you have in place. You can do simulations, but quite often you aren’t willing to invite any real risk in an exercise — the stress on the system isn’t real. So sure, you can time how long it takes for a response to happen in a test or know that a backup system is present, but under real conditions things fall apart quickly. You have different traffic patterns because of fallen trees and traffic lights that are out of commission. That backup system didn’t engage because of an overlooked problem, and you never actually tried it out because you didn’t want any downtime. At best you can find things that worked but would work even better or be useful in that situation, but never noticed because you weren’t in that situation. Hey, you know what? We need an emergency light here! Or, this system status data would really be useful to have in real-time. So there are flaws and potential improvements that only come to light under actual stress.

It took me more than an hour to get home, when it usually takes me less than 30 minutes. The district DOT people closed off Rock Creek Parkway to southbound traffic, which they normally do at 3:45 PM, but they did it at 2:30 and forced a bunch of Virginia-bound drivers into the downtown area to find another bridge. Bad call, IMO. Surprises are bad — I think you want to keep routines as constant as possible. Disruptions to routine usually makes things worse. Crossing the Potomac requires a bridge or tunnel, and shutting off a main route to one of them is one reason traffic was so heavy. There are more options for getting into Maryland.

I’m not at liberty to discuss the operations response at work, but I’ll put it this way: I’m sure the press would not have been shy about pointing out problems had they arisen. If I had not been caught up in the response, I probably would have appreciated this more in real-time: I work with a bunch of professionals. People who do what they need to do, without being told — checking on systems, making sure a backup has kicked in if there’s a problem with the primary, and then diagnosing what that problem is when they find one. And I cannot fathom why there are those in elected positions who think it’s worthwhile to put pressure on these people, essentially inviting them to leave government service, by under-compensating them so that they would have to be replaced by less capable people. This attitude filters down either by diffusion or by direct pressure. If you continue along that path you’ll be left with people who are senior enough that staying is still worthwhile since they are heavily vested in the retirement program and marginally competent junior people who can’t get better jobs in the private sector. When the senior people retire, the system will crumble. Maybe that’s what people are looking for, as an excuse to privatize or disband more of government, but I think it’s a bad idea.

It became apparent that there are government people working in fairly critical positions whose primary means of communication is a cell phone. The cell phone system froze for a period of time after the quake, isolating these people. This is where the argument about how “the market” will provide a solution just fails. Even with whatever FCC requirements exist, the system collapsed. It wasn’t a matter of one carrier reaching saturation, to be fixed by switching providers. What if this had been more serious? Would the rationale that lives were lost because the market does not value the extra capacity really hold up? Government regulations are an absolute requirement in cases where the players cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. The mantra that less regulation is always better is sheer idiocy. We already have too many wingnuts thinking that e.g. the EPA should be emasculated. As a citizen I don’t see the upside of more air, water and land pollution. Ultimately it’s cheaper to prevent it than clean it up. We don’t need fewer people inspecting our food or maintaining our roads. We don’t need softer building codes.

One more thing, about the mockery from the west-coasters: payback is a bitch. Yes, many people overreacted, because they are not used to earthquakes, and you stay calm because you go through it. But because they are common, you build for them. There are a lot of old buildings — i.e. structurally questionable — in DC. Not so much in LA, or especially San Francisco, because all of the really old buildings burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp during some previous earthquake. How much of SF construction dates back before 1906? A 5.9 earthquake here is not to be compared to a 5.9 there. Here, it’s the biggest earthquake we’ve had in more than 100 years. You want a real comparison? What would be the LA reaction to a hard freeze? The city has only seen a temperature as low as 29ºF in the last 80 years — that’s the record low. Do you think maybe you’d scurry about in a bit of a panic if that were to happen again, worrying about bursting pipes and dead plants, because you aren’t built for that sort of thing? DC may not handle snow very well (not many really big cities do), but we get freezing weather quite a bit. It’s not a problem. I’ll keep a snarkball in the freezer, ready to throw at you, in case this ever happens.

Earthquaaaake!

We were hit with an earthquake (earlier today as I write this, yesterday as this is posted); preliminary reports had it at a 5.8 with the epicenter about 85 miles away from DC. I was at work and it took a second to realize it wasn’t someone rolling a heavy cart down the hallway. I was all “What the?” (as I moved to stand in the doorframe of my office) because earthquakes aren’t all that common in this area. But I’ve been through the experience a few times before.

I came home to find that entropy had increased in my abode from the shakin’ and bakin’. Most of the top row of CDs (Beatles through Dire Straits) had fallen, and many things on another set of shelves had tipped over or made it to the ground.

Also check out Virginia earthquake waves ripple across the US! from the Bad Astronomer

Looks like I will be busy fulfilling my duties as a member of an American chapter of the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things

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