Saturday Snaps

Took a few phone snaps while I was on Mt. Tam to check my camera traps on Saturday. I climbed a nearby hill where the sun was trying to break through the clouds in what promised to be a stunning display of backlighting, crepuscular rays, glories, and brocken specter, but the fog rose too high and the sun was blotted out. A raven joined me, glad for a little company. In recent weeks the bay laurels have been bustling with ravens feeding on peppernuts, but the frenzy seemed to have died down.

There was lovely fall color in patches of poison oak, and in just the past week, all the dry, stony creekbeds with their shrinking pools had filled with the rush of singing water. I hadn't really expected to find fungi just yet, but a large dyer's polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) surprised me, and some young oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) promised edibles to come.

Happy Halloween Tree

Fall Color in the Poison Oak

The Twin Snag at Rock Spring

Climbing Poison Oak Vines & Creek Dogwood

Dyer's Polypore

More Spooky Stuff

Oyster Babies on Mossy Log

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Building Blocks

 

Sand Tufa at Mono Lake

They thought physics was dead more than a hundred years ago. Before Max Planck postulated the quantum. Before Einstein explained the photoelectric effect. Long before dark energy and dark matter. And way, way before double-charm tetraquarks!

From Quanta Magazine: “The unexpected discovery of the double-charm tetraquark highlights an uncomfortable truth. While physicists know the exact equation that defines the strong force … they can rarely solve this strange, endlessly iterative equation, so they struggle to predict the strong force’s effects.”

I love it that physicists are stuck with an equation they can rarely solve, that physics is not dead, and that nature is still bending minds, thank you very much. The writer goes on to explain that the tetraquark they discovered was surprisingly stable—because it lasted 12 sextillionths of a second!

And here I am thinking a flash sync of 1/250^th of a second is blink-of-an-eye fast. Of course in the context of atomic physics it would be ridiculous to even call a blinking eye “fast.” Anything that took as long as an eye-blink to happen would probably put a particle physicist to sleep!

A tempting internal hyperlink in the above article took me to a page about protons, which reminded me of a Star Trek: Next Generation episode that I recently watched on Amazon Prime (“When the Bough Breaks”). When this kid who’s maybe 12 years old was scolded by his dad for ditching his calculus homework, I hoped that they would eventually show the kid why calculus is useful. Alas, they missed their chance. Maybe the writers themselves didn’t know either.

Not only did we not learn calculus when I was in 7^th grade (the year after Apollo 11 landed on the moon), we didn’t learn about quarks either, much less tetraquarks. An atom was a neutron, plus protons and electrons, and that was that. So I thought it was funny when the linked article started out saying, “We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks—two ‘up’ quarks and a ‘down’ quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and -1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far stranger, as-yet-unresolved story.”

I love that the proton story I learned about has become passé, but you’ll have to read the article to see how mind-blowing the “as-yet-unresolved story” is. How intricate and mysterious this beautiful world is.

October Sunrise, Mono Lake

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Town & Country

I've been getting lots of raccoon activity out back recently. I believe this is a family group, and that it is the same group whose younger, smaller members I saw trooping around maybe a month or so ago. I keep a bowl of water out for the local wildlife, birdlife and neighborhood cats, and I can always tell in the morning when the raccoons have been around the night before because the bowl will be empty of water and full of sand (from putting their paws in the water).

 

Town Raccoons

Country Raccoon

Town Skunk

Country Skunk

It's not unusual at certain times of the year to see a hermit thrush poking around out back, and they frequently show up on the Tam Cams also.

Town Hermit Thrush

Country Hermit Thrush

Okay, it's not exactly comparing apples to apples since the town and country rats are different species. In fact, the Old World and New World rats are even in different families. I had to go way back to February to find a rat picture, partly because I don't retain all the rat captures, but also, I suspect, because my next-door neighbor recently hired a rat-exterminator.

Town (Norway) Rat

Country (Wood) Rat

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Phrase Shift

Monarch on Toyon

Maybe Doris Day popped into my head this morning, although I can no longer trace the line of thought that would have led to such a thing. But the French phrase, “Que sera, sera” (“Whatever will be, will be”) popped into my head, followed directly by the American phrase, “It is what it is.” I asked myself what those two phrases might say about the respective national characters that produced them.

The French phrase seems to put the emphasis on the future, and the American phrase seems to put the emphasis on the present. In fact, though, the French phrase is actually suggesting that we enjoy the present and shrug our shoulders about the future. The American phrase suggests that we accept the present (because we’re too taciturn to “enjoy” it) and shrug our shoulders about the past.

I guess that’s the “national character” difference in a nutshell. The French remind themselves to enjoy the present, and the Americans simply accept that they’re stuck with all the bad decisions they’ve made. The French ideal is to drink champagne in the face of, for example, a changing climate and its portents of catastrophe, while the American ideal is to say, in the aftermath of the latest flood, drought, heat-wave, or wildfire, “No use crying over spilt milk; deal with it.”

The future will take care of itself, and the past is past. Nothing to do about the former, and nothing to learn from the latter.

Or, as Annie Hall would say, “La-dee-da, la-dee-da.”

And that, my friends, is why we call ourselves Homo sapiens, “the wise people.”

Pipevine Swallowtail

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Phased Out

About this time a year ago I was out for my morning walk around the neighborhood when I saw the crescent moon rising behind Twin Peaks. The gorgeous silver sliver was positioned so that the moon appeared to be at rest just above the cupped peaks, almost like a sacrament held above open hands. After I got home I took a picture even though the moon had moved out of position, in part to help remind myself to try again the following year.

So the year passed and I was ready for that last thin sliver before the new moon to make its appearance on Monday. I was also thankful for a clear sky. I skipped my morning walk so I could be in place with my camera for the repeat event.

I first saw the crescent when it appeared just south of the base of Sutro Tower. It was a beautiful sight, but I could already sense that something wasn’t quite right.

From the position of the moon at that point, it didn’t seem like its trajectory was going to be exactly the same as the moon phase that occurred last year on October 15. When I looked through the viewfinder I could tell right away that the 300mm lens I used for last year’s shot was going to be too tight. This year I had to use a 105mm to get the moon and the peaks in the same frame. 

If I had waited until Tuesday to try the shot (which would have been in keeping with last year's sighting, being the day before the new moon), I'd have been skunked by fog. In any event, the crescent moon doesn't rise along the same angle or even at the same time from year to year, although the Photographer's Ephemeris had Tuesday's moonrise far enough south of Monday's to have probably made all the difference in the world; foiled by Carl the Fog again). Maybe next year....

As I watched the moonrise it was interesting to recall that there weren't so many airplanes flying across the frame last year, and sightseers weren't allowed to drive up to Twin Peaks.

Last October I was already amazed that the pandemic had continued to keep me working from home over the summer. Now another whole year has gone by, and my office isn’t scheduled to reopen until January 2022. That’s despite the fact that almost everyone has been vaccinated since last spring.

I do wonder if we’re being over-cautious, but it’s even more wondrous to me that so many people seem to believe it’s more risky to get the vaccine than the disease. I recently saw a comment on NextDoor by an anti-vax person who claimed to have several friends who contracted myocarditis, but she neglected to mention that you’re six-times more likely to get myocarditis after a Covid-19 infection than you are after an mRNA vaccination.

Speaking of playing the odds, I wonder if the moon will ever repeat the trajectory I saw last year. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled, just in case.

Waning Crescent Over Twin Peaks
October 4, 2021

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Circular Reasoning

 

Brocken Specter

I pushed the shower door open this morning and played with the arc of water droplets falling off the far edge of the door onto my bath mat. By pushing with a steady, even pressure I took pleasure in controlling the uniformity of the arc that drew itself on the mat. That’s probably the same pleasure that Jackson Pollock felt when he dripped paint onto canvas. There’s something pleasurable about creating a design on a surface without coming into direct contact with it. In a way, photography is like that. If I photograph a landscape, the subject is the dripping water, and the light sensor is the bath mat.

But I digress. Once I saw the arc forming, the pivot point of the door reminded me of a compass, which got me thinking about the arc in terms of degrees. A circle is an arc of 360 degrees, but what is the minimum degree of arc you need to know in order to calculate the circle’s radius and, by extension, its circumference?

Glory with Brocken Specter

Although I love questions like that, I have very little patience for finding their answers. I searched the internet in the hope of finding an easy answer, and I guess I did, because I found out it’s not possible. You can’t calculate the radius with the degree of arc alone because you also need what they call the sector angle.

The sector angle is formed by two radii extending from the center of the circle to each end of the arc, like a slice of pizza. The arc length is equal to the radius times the sector angle. I was trying hard to remain patient as I encountered these mathematical terms until I saw that you have to convert degrees of arc into radians, a term I was not familiar with despite the fact that I used to ride a Yamaha Radian motorcycle.

I almost stopped my line of inquiry at this point, but I found the conversion of degrees to radians as easily online as I could have found the conversion of dollars into yen. Enter “convert degrees to radians” into a Google search bar if you don’t believe me.

As you’ll see, each degree of arc is “worth” 0.0174533 radians (a radian equals pi divided by 180; not so tough after all).

But we’re still stuck with the fact that you need two of three numbers to calculate the third number. So I thought of a new question: Couldn’t you draw straight lines that just touch the ends of each side of the arc and converge in what would be the center of the circle?

I couldn’t do it in my head, and I feared I was treading close to calculus or something, so I set a nickel down on a piece of paper and used a pen to draw part of a circle. I looked at the arc and used a bookmark to draw a straight line past both ends of the arc. Sure enough, the lines converged on a point and created a slice of pizza, but was the point of intersection actually the center of my circle?

To find out, I set the nickel back down and drew the rest of the circle.

Long story short, the point was not in the center. Not even close.

Glory Photographed With Polarizing Filter

By this time I realized I had spent an awful lot of time following my curiosity into a mathematical dead-end. But at least it was time enjoyably spent.

Similarly, I recently went to see the Joan Mitchell show at SFMOMA. I do not consider myself a fan of abstract art, and my artist wife was braced for the possibility that I might not like the show. One of the cool things about art, though, is that it can affect you in a way that leaves you speechless.

Sandhill Cranes & Waning Crescent Moon

You could walk past a Joan Mitchell painting, or even a whole room full of them, glancing at them one by one before moving on to the next, and be confirmed in your suspicion that abstract art was useless. But the minute you stop wandering and actually plant yourself in front of one of these paintings, you get sucked in by its power.

Waves of light reflect off the paint and enter your eyes, triggering a cascade of neuronal impulses that converge on the point in your brain where your soul resides, producing more electrochemical cascades that release an emotion that spreads through your being like a drop of ink dispersing in a glass of water. What that emotion is, I can’t exactly say. I guess it’s a kind of awe. Whatever it was, it was deep and powerful, and I felt amazed and grateful for having experienced it.

The show continues until January 17, 2022.

Crane With Rising Sun

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Intermission

“Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.”

—Rumi 

Although I don't anticipate adding new posts to the blog for a while, I'll still enjoy leafing through pages from the past, especially pages from the same month in different years.

And speaking of revisiting the past, I recently returned to a part of Mt. Tamalpais where I used to roam around quite a bit back in the early '90s, a place where I could allow the landscape to reveal itself to me over a period of years, a place above Redwood Creek and west of Muir Woods that I called Bobcat Hill. I was drawn into that landscape by the inviting sight of a thin deer trail that meandered like a mountain stream through coyote brush embankments. It's headwaters disappeared over a hilltop horizon where nature's secrets beckoned from beyond.

The deer trail has faded quite a bit in the ensuing years. The coyote brush has grown so thick that whole meadows of bunchgrass where mission bells once bloomed have disappeared, as well as old landmarks like a small grove of Douglas firs under whose branches I took refuge from rain and wind, and where I once startled a sleeping coyote. A small grove of spindly oaks that occasionally sprouted a chanterelle motherlode has disappeared. A stony outcrop where vultures used to warm their wings in the morning was gone, buried in dense chaparral. The sunny patch of meadow where I once did a vision quest was an impenetrable thicket.

Nature shapes the mountain in a continuous trail through time. And all kinds of trails, whether lines on the landscape, flushes of sulfur tufts on a fir tree, or bobcats disappearing into the woods, will always kindle my sense of wonder. Even time itself is a trail: I took this picture of myself nearly twenty years ago, and when another twenty years passes I'll be an old man, hopefully still walking the trails of wonder and awe.

December Scenes

Cataract Falls

Bolinas Ridge Rainbow

Raven's Leap

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Life's A Beach

 

Harbor Seals in the Fog

Western Snowy Plover

Going Big

Making a Splash

Contemplating the Moon

Pink Promenade

Golden Glow

Seal Rock Sunset

I 💖 SF

Happy Veteran's Day!

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Yosemite This Morning

 

Lookin' Good

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Snow Day

Snowy Fall Morning on the Merced River, Yosemite Valley

November 2012

There's snow in the forecast for the mountains this weekend. Roaming around a freshly snowed-on landscape in Yosemite Valley is among the best experiences I've ever had.

The city noises of San Francisco have been left far behind. Now the soft munching of deer browsing a few feet away competes with the soft patter of snowflakes landing in the surrounding woods.

Although you can't help stopping at Tunnel View to take in the grand vista...

...it's also great to roam around quietly to hear the landscape's more intimate voices.

The beauty of an early snowstorm is having color in the trees instead of bare branches.

Cloak of Ferns

Gates of the Valley

Riverside Brushstrokes

Sealed in Ice

Dipper Catches a Morsel

Snow Pillows in the Merced

El Capitan Fog Factory

November Morning

Scouring Rush

Yosemite Valley

Not even a memory of summer crowds.

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