11/17/07 - A Taste of Home

According to the docent, the original tree fell in the Tacoma area and was collected, along with lots of mosses and little undergrowth plants, to comprise the Neukom Nurselog exhibit. They did a nice job, though we aren't sure of what the museum people are going to do when the young trees growing from the old log start getting tall. We'd like to think that they'll have a fund drive and grow the building. Why not a taste of artificial rain forest in downtown Seattle?

10/30/07 - A Calf is Born

We bought some milk, and some cheese, and did some Christmas shopping for a friend of ours. Meanwhile, we could look out the window and watch the cow having contractions as she tried to deliver. It looked like hard work which is probably why they call it labor. One of the spectators, not one of us, remarked that it looked like she was having a cow, which indeed she was.

Suddenly, after a series of contractions, the calf was ejected. It was wrapped in a membrane and looked like something from a science fiction movie, perhaps Calf Cocoon II - The Cow Horror Continues. The calf didn't move much, but we could see she was breathing. Sarah Brown went to check her and announced that the baby was a girl, and then left her with mom.

Grandma was in the next field bellowing advice, and she was joined by a few other cows who watched for a while and then drifted off. Meanwhile, Mom set out to the serious business of licking her newborn while her newborn tried to figure out how to stand up.

We watched for a good half hour. Mom did a good job licking, and the cocoon disappeared to reveal a wet calf. Then the wet calf turned into a dry calf despite all the licking. Meanwhile the newborn rested a few minutes, then tried to stand, then rested a few more minutes, and so on. In the nature documentaries, they use ellipsis. A calf is born, then the calf stands on its shaky legs and nurses. With Dungeness Valley Creamery milk the calf had additional impetus to get to the nursing stage.

We hung around for the next half hour trying to be encouraging, and there were definitely signs of progress. Mom seemed to have satisfied herself that her baby had been adequately licked. Her calf could rise on her hind legs, and we could see her struggling to get her two front legs into position for that critical coordinated push.

All of the other cows had left some time ago leaving mother and child on their own, or rather, with us humans and our longer attention spans. We had other errands to run, so we decided that things were likely to turn out for the best. Sarah, having determined that the newborn was a girl, wasn't worried, and the calf looked helpful, so we assume that things worked out for the best.

07/26/07 - Driving Time and Distance Map of the North Olympic Peninsula

To help the many visitors to the park and surrounding areas, we offer this Kaleberg Driving Time and Distance Map of the North Olympic Peninsula. It is based on the distances as computed by Google Maps, but we have used our own estimated driving times rather than the Google estimates. Google has some peculiar ideas on how fast one can drive on various park roads, and they still have the Hurricane Hill Trail from Whiskey Bend to Hurricane Hill as an automobile road! We're sure that was a trail, even before Google was founded. We've also taken some liberties in defining certain intermediate locations which do not appear on any map. In general, things like Elwha Turnoff and Hoh River Crossing are not marked as such on any other map you might find, but are useful junction points linking roads and turnoffs, just what you want for planning your drive.

05/13/07 - Thomas Edison: Inventor of the Light Switch

We were driving out to Lake Ozette and trying to figure out how to use the cruise control. We think we found the enable switch, because some green light on the console did light up as we remembered, but we just couldn't figure out how to tell the cruise control to actually engage. Cruise control ties up three buttons on the steering wheel, and surely it could be made simpler to use.

While struggling, we pondered why these things are so hard, and why it takes someone like Steve Jobs to make simple things simple. Perhaps, we considered, Thomas Edison's greatest invention wasn't the light bulb, but the light switch. Candles require a match, or a flint box, to light. Oil lamps, and even gas lamps, are no better. If you wanted electric lights, you had to power up the generator, and that probably made starting up a lawn mower look simple.

What Edison did was invent the light switch. Push it one way to turn the light on. Push it the other way to turn the light off. That's sort of amazing. It's really simple.

03/06/07 - The Microstructure of Matter

Back in the 1960s there was something called the Atomic Energy Commission. They were in charge of making atomic bombs and otherwise spreading the good word about nuclear power. They have since been replaced by the NRC and the DOE, but during their tenure they produced a number of neat booklets about atomic power, radio-isotopes, computers and the like. Given that these booklets were FREE, they were surprisingly good, with clear exposition, accurate information, interesting photographs and well drawn diagrams.

Of course, some of the science has changed, and some of our attitudes are quite different. We came across one of our old favorites, The Microstructure of Matter, on eBay. Since this was a government publication with no copyright notice, we assume that it is in the public domain. This booklet describes the basic natural forces, how scientists study the various subatomic particles, a bit about relativity and a fair bit about the particles themselves. Quarks and the standard model were just around the corner, but one can see the standard model emerging from the sprays of mesons and hadrons in the cloud chambers of the era.

Yes, some of the science has changed, but an awful lot has not. It is often rather interesting to get a snapshot of our understanding at a given time, if only to get a sense of where we might be in that greater understanding that we are all working towards.

12/26/06 - Antisolar Crepuscular Light

After our Christmas dinner, but shortly before sunset we took a walk along the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, starting at Morse Creek. As we headed east back to the parking lot we were extremely aware of the failing light and the cloudy sky. We also noticed dark streaks in the sky towards the east, directly opposite the direction of the setting sun. These were not pillars of smoke, but something more interesting. They were the shadows of clouds cast by the setting sun. (Move your mouse over the picture to see a contrast exagerated view).

Basically, when the sun is low, cloud shadows can be hundreds of miles long. They are most visible when viewed parallel to the direction of the casting light and area least visible when viewed perpendicularly. Because of perspective effects, the rays appear to diverge from the setting sun, which was obscured by the coastal bluffs we were at the base of, and they appear to converge at the antisolar point on the horizon opposite the sun.

11/26/06 - How to Build a K'Nex Promenade Lamp

One of our site visitors asked how to build one of these lamps, so we uploaded some photos and diagrams to help out. This is a really pretty lamp, and not that hard to make.

For the photographs and diagrams, click here.

07/27/06 - A Mouse Riding A Frog

This picture looks like an illustration from some fantasy novel. We found it in the 14 July 2006 issue of Science Magazine, the AAAS journal, with a simple caption. The frog is an Asian toad (no species given); the location is in the floodwaters of Lucknow, which has been experiencing one serious monsoon, but little else is revealed. The next article in the section was on Rewiring the Brain, but we don't think that the mouse rewired the frog toad's brain, though that is the sort of thing we would expect to find in a fantasy novel.

12/07/05 - Flat Screen and Pregnant - A Kaleberg journey into computer French

Christmas season often finds us browsing the internet for presents. It's also finals season, so we find ourselves browsing in French to keep our vocabulary up to date. Such is the price of being a homework helper. All this highly focussed browsing often gets us to interesting web pages, for example, those with gift ideas in French. This led us to ponder the tribulations of being écran plat and enceinte, flat screen and pregnant. It turns out that this is quite easy in French, if you speak proper computer French. For more on this, see our latest Kaleberg journey.

10/11/05 - Google Maps Come to Clallam County

We've been playing around with Google Maps. This is a rather neat interactive mapping system developed by Google. It uses a road database like Mapquest and a false color satellite database so you can see not only the streets and roads, but also get a sense of the land usage and urban density. The interface is neat too. It's the old electronic light table idea. You just put down your mouse and drag, and your web browser loads in the image tiles as you go.

Our map of Clallam County shows farms, lavender growers and wineries. If you click on one, it will tell you a bit more about the destination. It also shows the growing suburban sprawl in the Sequim area. If you look carefully, you see housing developments and golf courses. For some contrast, drag the mouse upwards, and you'll see the Olympic National Park and National Forest boundaries. Those park and forest boundaries are more than just lines on the map.

09/01/05 - The Original Spacewar - The Saga Article

06/06/05 - Chocolate Beans

06/01/05 - Tide Finder for Finding Good Tides

04/30/05 - The Dangers of Obesity

01/09/05 - NOAA and the Weather

05/19/04 - Copper River Salmon Has Arrived

Also, we've been thinking about the old computer game of Dazzle Darts. It was one of those rather simple games, like Pong, that came out of the 1970s, except that Dazzle Darts seems to have vanished.

04/30/04 - Our Remote Control K'Nex Lamp