07/30/19 - Hawaiian Luau

05/07/18 - Soho and Canal Street

We also explored Soho. That's the area south of Houston Street (pronounced How-ston.) It was once a manufacturing district. Remember how old cars seem to ride a lot higher then modern cars? That's because the hypoid gear was invented in what is now Soho and transfers power in a flatter package. For a while it was a cutting edge fashion district, but now it's more major designers, the way Madison Avenue used to be. We did find an LA Burdick's chocolate shop, so we stopped in to admire their chocolate mice.

We made our way down to Canal Street. This was once a canal and later a red light district. When the old World Trade Center came in and destroyed Radio Row, many of the shops moved up to Canal Street. Most of them are gone, but we found Color Wire, a shop selling modern lighting gear. This includes a broad range of LED bulbs designed to look like old fashioned incandescents. They also have all sorts of rope lights and LED panels. It was right down the block from the Canal Plastics Center which has been around since at least the 1960s and has a broad variety of plastics. It was like coming home.

08/26/17 - Partial Solar Eclipse

06/27/17 - Hurricane Hill and a Sunbow

On our way back, admiring the views of the main mountain chain to the south, we noticed that one of the high cirrus clouds was not quite pure white. It was colored and colored like the rainbow. There was another cirrus cloud not far, and it too was also colored, but more faintly. It took a bit of thinking, but what we were seeing was part of a colored circle, a rainbow around the sun, but only visible where there were ice crystals in the high clouds.

That's called a sunbow. It's not like a rainbow. Rainbows are centered around the anti-solar point, the point farthest away from the sun. A sunbow is centered around the sun. It was a pretty rare sighting. Moonbows, colored rings around the moon are much more common, so we were quite pleased with such a fine view.

04/10/17 - Terracotta Warriors at the Pacific Science Center

The warriors were discovered in the 1970s, and since then the excavation has turned into a large scale archeological project with thousands of full sized clay warriors, hundreds of clay horses and countless other artifacts buried to accompany the Qin emperor in his afterlife. It wasn't just warriors but musicians, craftsmen and personal goods. Like the pharaohs, the emperor was not going to trust the gods to provide. He would be buried with everything he might ever need to reign eternally after death.

The show made excellent use of lighting and projection giving a sense of how the warriors would have appeared when buried as opposed to how they appear now. One of our favorite pieces was a set of terracotta miniatures showing how the warriors and horses were formed and assembled. Usually, we try to get home from Walla Walla in one long drive and wind up getting stuck in Tacoma. Stopping in Seattle meant an easier drive, but, even better, seeing a first class exhibit.

03/17/17 - March Moonrise

05/06/16 - Light Column and Rainbow

11/28/15 - Ice Crystals

05/16/15 - Replacement Stove Knobs

Luckily, we live in the age of 3D printing, so we fired up the old 3D modeling program - we use Cheetah3D - and designed a new stove knob. This meant measuring the old ones with calipers and designing some new ones which would be easier to read and work with our old cooktop.

We uploaded the 3D model to the Shapeways web site, did a little tweaking, and two weeks later we'd get a stove knob in the mail. The first two really didn't work, but on our third try, the knob worked. We submitted an order to print three more, and two weeks later we had a new set of stove knobs. We first heard of 3D printing technology back in 1979. Maybe the future is coming after all.

If you want your own print out of a stove knob for an ancient (pre-D post) Jenn Air stove knob, check out the product site at Shapeways.

03/14/15 - Pompeii in Seattle

Pompeii was destroyed by a volcano in the first century, but not by a lava flow. It was buried under volcanic ash, so all sorts of things were preserved, locked in stone. The folks living in Pompeii had no idea that they were living next to a recently active volcano. In fact, the Romans of the day had never even heard of a volcano, save possibly for highly distorted accounts in old stories of dubious veracity. We have no such excuse, so we don't buy retirement condos with names like Rancho Mount Saint Helens.

There were mosaics, glass bottles, statues of household gods, frescos, furniture, dishes and even somebody's safe decorated with various figures associated with vigilance and defense. We were fascinated, as we Kalebergs often are. The exhibit is in Seattle until the end of May, so if you are at all interested in this kind of thing, make your plans soon.

12/20/13 - Crepuscular Light

09/09/13 - The Truth About Kale

It's hilarious. (No, the kale cultivars we eat have extremely low levels of the chemicals noted, though there are heirloom varietals with higher ones. No, no one is expecting kale to feed the world. Most people will go on eating the usual staples, but maybe with a nice dish of kale on the side.)

04/15/13 - The Science of Middle Earth

"Plumes of all sizes seem to rise from two huge piles of who-knows-what sitting 2900 kilometers down at the bottom of Earth's mantle embedded in a mystery layer hundreds of kilometers thick. The outline of an operating manual is coming into view, but some pieces of the Earth engine are yet to be labeled."

We are definitely on the frontier here. Let's face it: no one knows what; it is a mystery layer. That's real science.

01/18/13 - Lissajou Figures

There are a number of Lissajou figure generators on the internet, but most of them require Java. Right now Java is having its own special effects crisis as a security risk, so it is time for a replacement. This generator uses HTML5, so it will run in most newer browsers, though it may not run in some older ones. Click this link and go play. There are two parameters, generally small integers, you can adjust, and you can drag your cursor across the phase shift rectangle to make the figure "rotate". It's a spacey effect. Sometimes it will appear to be rotating horizontally, but if you tilt your head you will see that it is rotating vertically as well. (Try 5, 4 for that.)

12/31/12 - Two Out Of Four

06/18/12 - We Answer Questions - Operation Twist

1) Bonds are just loans. If someone, usually a company or government entity, wants to borrow money, they can write down promises to repay in the form of bonds which are legal documents, contracts, that state:

• a) A certain sum must be paid on a certain future date
• b) Certain sums of interest must be paid at certain intervals
• c) The borrower may repay the loan early, but not before a certain date, the call date
• d) This is a contract since a, b & c are because the borrower received a certain amount when the bond was issued.

A lot of financial instruments use the same structure. If you buy a CD at your bank, you get a certificate of deposit which is basically a bond saying you'll get your money, your principal, back on a certain date, and you'll get interest at various intervals up until then. If you borrow money and sign a promissory note, you promise to repay and to pay interest. A mortgage is just a promissory note wrapped up with land and a house as collateral. A treasury note is just a bond issued by the federal government. Corporate bonds are just bonds issued by corporations.

You'll notice that most of finance is about money now and money later, so it's mainly about how money travels through time.

Also, there are a lot of names for the same thing. The distinctions are usually historical. On the sidewalk it might be an IOU; 20 floors up it's a bond; if there's real estate as collateral, it's a mortgage. (The real in real estate comes from the same root as royal, not realize.)

2) Operation Twist is based on the segmentation of the market for treasury notes and the fact that the US government cannot go broke.

Despite what the deficit scare mongerers say, the US government cannot go broke. It can always print more money. This means that federal debt is the safest game in town. (Look at what happened when one of the rating agencies cut the US credit rating; interest rates went down making it even easier to borrow.) Since interest rates are based on the level of risk of repayment, the treasury pays the lowest rates at every time scale. All other interest rates are based on these. A lender always has the choice to lend to the government or to some riskier party, but they expect higher interest payments as a premium for accepting the risk of losing their money.

The federal government borrows money at many different time scales, so one can buy government bonds with periods ranging from 30 days to 30 years. The short term notes, for a year or shorter, are mainly used for parking big lots of money safely. Large bank accounts are not FDIC insured, so if you have a million dollars you might need at any time, you'd constantly be buying and selling, 30 or 90 day notes. If you are a pension fund and are trying to meet your 2040 obligations, you might buy 20 or 30 year bonds. Most business lending is in the 10 year range so the interest rates on business loans are roughly tied to the 10 year government rate.

The goal of Operation Twist, also called quantitative easing, is to lower the 10 year government rate by manipulating the market for government bonds. The idea is that the Federal Reserve owns trillions of dollars of treasury bonds, more than anybody else, so they are big enough to influence rates across the board. Operation Twist has the Federal Reserve selling their 10 year bonds and buying 30 year bonds. This should lower the rates on 10 year notes and raise them on 30 year notes. Lower rates on 10 year treasury bonds should mean lower rates for loans across the board. Lower rates should stimulate the economy.

This would usually be the case, except that interest rates are already very low, and the economy has lots of other problems. If you account for inflation, federal interest rates are negative, meaning that the lender is paying the government to hold his or her money. It isn't clear they can go a lot lower or that this would have much effect. Also, businesses consider other factors when deciding whether to borrow money or not, for example, many of them are worried about their customers, and their customers are worried about their jobs and the size of their paychecks. It doesn't make sense to expand if no one is buying now.

03/09/12 - Volvelleteer Updates