Smother-frying

I live in an extended family and as jobs and other life situations change, responsibilities shift over time. I have recently become the chief cook and bottle washer (literally) and that isn't a complaint because I really do enjoy cooking. 

I specifically enjoy cooking because I enjoy eating good food and, if I'm cooking, it lets me ensure that there will be good food. 

The problem is that, since I retired seven years ago, others have been doing the cooking. I was a little worried that I had lost my touch but, evidently, cooking is like riding a bicycle...without the pedals, of course.

A lot of the food from my first family has come to my rescue. I didn't really carry the food of my childhood with me when I started college and moved from home but, after my parents died, I found myself going back more and more.

Southern food developed in a society where people had little time away from work to deliver extravagant meals to their families and poverty often forced them to use what they produced from their own gardens or otherwise had on hand. From humble origins, a real cuisine developed.

A popular meal here centers on smother-fried meat. I didn't specify the kind of meat because pretty much whatever you excavate from your freezer will serve.

The key idea is that gravy will cover a multitude of sins. Bad cuts of meat, over cooked main dishes, left overs? Gravy is always the answer!

Smother-frying is a multi-step process.

I start with about a pound of meat for three people. If it's a big chunk like pork loin, it needs to be cut into slabs. Chicken breasts are fine whole. With a hot skillet (about 250°) with a liberal amount of oil or grease coating the bottom, I lay out the meat and sprinkle it with seasoning (Tony Chachere's seasoning is the current favorite) and a coating of all-purpose flour (I use about a half cup flour for 2 pounds of meat, then another half cup when I flip the meat ). Then, that fries for five minutes.

The flour isn't really a batter - it will make the gravy. I just want it to absorb the flavors in the pan as the meat cooks.

After five minutes covered, I flip the meat. Add a cup of water to keep the stuff in the bottom of the pan from burning to black. Charred is good, black is bad. More seasonings and most of the rest of a cup of flour goes on the meat. Cover again for five minutes.

Flip the meat and scrape up the stuff that has stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add a little more water and let it all cook covered for a couple more minutes. You'll want water and salt (I use soy sauce for the salt) on hand for the next part).

Reduce the heat to a simmer. This is the fun part where you craft the gravy.

Scrape all the stuff off the bottom of the skillet with a spatula and start adding water and, maybe, more flour until you have a lumpy gravy. This is not a place for satiny smoothness. Work out all the big lumps. Taste the gravy occasionally and add salt and other seasonings until it tastes the way you want it.

Let it simmer until you've ready to serve it and you've got a great meal.

I like this dish because you can play with it using just about any kind of meat (fish takes a delicate touch and a lighter gravy with much less thickening, in fact eggs, instead of flour makes can interesting gravy), different seasonings and thickeners, and a vast variety of sides. In the picture above, I lined up smother-fried chicken breasts with white rice and seasoned, steamed vegetables.

Smother-frying involves a good bit of style. If you try it out, you'll find yourself automatically adjusting to the amount of heat you use, how you deglaze the pan, how much and how often you add water and seasoning... it's a method you can own.

Do you know your north?

Heh. In the Denver area, that's easy.

That's west. (See the Rockies?)

That's east. No mountains. In fact, when you top that hill, it's plains as far as you can see...all the way to the Mississippi River, 600 miles away. They don't call the Great Plains "Great" for nothing.

Facing the Rockies, north is to your right.

But why should you care?

Let's say that you're hiking somewhere other than Denver and you suddenly realize that you don't know where you are? Even if you have a map, you have to orient the map to your surroundings and the way you do that is to point north on your map (there will be a symbol pointing north just for that reason) toward geographic north.

You could just choose a direction and start walking. Surely a straight line will bring you to a road or stream or something you can follow out.

The problem there is that humans are very bad at walking in straight lines. They're much better at circles. People have a dominant side. If they're right handed, their stronger right side tends to push them to the left.

The way to walk in a straight line is to find a landmark and walk to it. When you get there, sight back to where you came from and extend that line of sight in the direction you're going, find another landmark, and walk there. Repeat.

But it's best if you have some idea of where you're going. Do you remember a road to the east of you? Is there a town somewhere to the southwest? Your reference is north.

When you face north, east is to your right, west is to your left, and south is behind you. And the sky will always tell you where north is. 

At night, Polaris, the pole star is due north (actually, it is off by about a degree but it's good enough for navigating on land.) If you know any objects in the sky, you should know Polaris, the Big Dipper, and Orion. The Big Dipper is hard to miss because it looks very much like a...well, big dipper. The two stars in the outer edge of the dipper are called the "pointer stars" because they point straight up at Polaris.

(South of the equator, Polaris australia is a very dim star, so you have to find where it should be by following the upright of the Southern Cross.)

If you find Polaris, you've found north so just walk straight toward...oh, wait, it's night. You shouldn't be walking around in a strange forest at night. Just wait until morning and, okay, where was Polaris, again?

Well, look for moss on a tree.

Eh, that's not a reliable way to find north. Moss likes sunshine and most of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere comes in from the South so, yes, mosses like southern exposures but they grow where they can. In dense forests, you can't trust them.

So, here's one.

Set up a vertical post (what astronomers call a "gnomon" - a rod used to cast a shadow or sight some object) and, at the top of its shadow, drive another rod into the ground. In about an hour, come back and place another rod at the tip of the gnomon's shadow (it will have moved). Strike a line from the gnomon halfway between the other two rods - that points north. A line from the second rod to the third points east.

The idea is that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and in the northern hemisphere, the sun is to the South, so the sun's shadow points north and moves from west to east. The problem is that this method depends on when you mark the shadows.

In the picture above, a line drawn from the rod at the left to the nearest rod points due north because I placed them at solar noon (not at Daylight Savings Time noon). At solar noon the sun is due South.

If you place the rods an equal time before and after noon, this method works.

Don't know what time it is? Well, start before noon and place small markers every so often at the ends of the gnomon shadow - maybe use little rocks or stick small twigs in the ground. Where the end of the shadow is closest to the gnomon - that's solar noon. Draw a line from the gnomon to that point and you have north.

If you spend a lot of time outdoors and pay attention to where the sun is, you can get to where you can just look at the sun and tell about what time it is and where north is.

Keep in mind that, in the Southern Hemisphere, you have to look for where the southern pole star would be if you could see it, and the sun will be in the north during the day.

A universal sundial

A world globe can be used as a sundial that can tell you the time of day anywhere on Earth, time of sunrise and sunset, how the seasons work, and many other things. All you have to do is orient it in the same direction relative to the sun as the Earth. That way, it models Earth in space. Here's how you do it.

You will need a surface that can be tilted (and, possibly a clamp for the base of the globe to keep it from tilting over. Alternately, there are globes that can be tilted in respect to the base.) You will also need a mini-gnomon. A gnomon is just a vertical rod that will cast a shadow in the sun. It has to be small enough to position on the globe's surface. I used a plastic bottle cap and drove a screw through the center from underneath. (The screw should be as near a right angle to the surface of the cap as you can make it. You can test it with a carpenter's angle or even the sides of a sheet of paper.) After using a carpenter's level, or a phone app level to level the surface you will place the globe on, place the cap on the surface and mark the edge at the point north of the screw. Use a magnetic compass or a phone app but don't forget to look up the correction for true north from where you live and add or subtract it from your compass bearing. (Do an Internet search for "magnetic declination".)

With the line between the screw and the edge mark pointing north, make another mark with an erasable marker at the end of the screw's shadow from the sun.

Now, set your globe on the surface with the north pole pointing north (according to your compass with the correction to true north.). Rotate the globe until your position is on top.

Now for the fine tuning. Place the mini-gnomon pointing north directly over your position on the globe. If the sun's shadow on the globe and the sun's shadow on the Earth are oriented the same, they will both be oriented the same in space in respect to the sun, so tilt and rotate your globe until the tip of the screw's shadow touches the mark you made earlier at the shadow's tip. Your globe is now aligned.

What time is it? One way to tell is to watch your mini-gnomon to see when it's shadow is shortest - that's solar noon. During daylight savings, the local time will be an hour behind solar noon.

You can find where on the globe that it's solar noon by moving the mini-gnomon around to find the place where it's shadow is shortest. That will be a line of longitude. Knowing that every 15 degrees of longitude is an hour will allow you to calculate the time anywhere on Earth (at least, while the sun is out.)

You may have heard that the sun is directly overhead on the equator at noon each day. Try it out.

When it's solar noon where you are, place the mini-gnomon directly over your position and slide it straight down your line of longitude to the equator. Does the screw cast a shadow? Not if it's one of the two annual equinoxes. On any other day, the sun will be exactly overhead somewhere north or south of the equator.

You can easily see where sunset and sunrise is by finding the day-night divider line on your globe.

At my current time, here, sunset is slowly creeping off Africa into the Atlantic.

There is a lot you can do with the universal sundial. Can you use a thermometer to measure differences in temperature on the surface of your globe according to the angle the sun is shining on it? That's what causes the seasons.

Once you have a globe oriented, you can use a clamp or clay or some other way to freeze it in position and make a cover to keep it out of the weather. Then you can use it all year.

Arduino Science Journal

I've commented on both Arduino and Science Journal on this blog. Now they're the same. Google has transferred Science Journal to Arduino, so, if you use Science Journal, it's time to upgrade.

I'm expecting good things in the future. Although Google has had a strong focus on education, it's sorta spread out and I've felt that the Journal hasn't grown nearly as much as it could. Arduino expresses a commitment to Science Journal and Arduino boards as an ongoing tool for learning. Hopefully we'll see exciting change in the future.

LabBooks

My dream job is "tutor". I enjoy seeing "the light go on" when someone grasps a difficult concept, such as differentiation. 

I've heard people say that calculus is hard because, unlike arithmetic, it's not intuitive. I've even heard people grudgingly say that algebra and trigonometry are intuitive. But not calculus.

Things are intuitive when we are exposed to them so much that they become second nature. We aren't exposed to fractions - we are exposed to parts of objects and fractions are the way we are taught to think about parts. Why are fractions intuitive and derivatives aren't? Derivatives are the way we learn to mathematically handle change and we are surrounded by change.

Why is, say, multiplication, intuitive? You probably know how to multiply two big numbers using long, or partial product, multiplication. You multiply one long number by each digit of the other long number and then you add the products together, but you have to position each of them just right before you add them. Why do you do that and why should you be confident that such a complicated procedure will work every time?

Is that intuitive?

Did you know that all the arithmetic you use is based on a handful of assumptions that nobody tries to prove. One is: a=a. Everything is equal to itself. That might be true in a single case, but how do we know that it's always true? I'm not at all equal to the me of five years ago, but then, I wasn't the same person five years ago that I am today. This instant, I am equal to myself.

Can you divide and always come up with whole number answers. There's a perfectly legitimate and useful way to do that and you might not remember it, but I can just about guarantee that you did it in elementary school! 

How do you know that 2+2=4, and why would you think that it is always the case? Can you prove it? We take an awful lot for granted.

Isaac Asimov was a great popularizer. Through most of his publication history, word processors didn't exist. Have you ever used a typewriter? Typewriters were what we used to create documents when I was in college. Word processors came out while I was in college. The typewriter word processors let you look at sentences you typed before you committed them to paper, but the computer programs were really cool. You could type an entire book, then go back and make corrections, change formats, and even add pictures (!!) before you printed it out. And then there were desktop publisher applications that made it all much easier and added a lot of options.

But the end result was still what I call "flat copy". The page just sat there while you read it. I still use word processors, for instance, I am typing this blog on a word processors app, Google Docs, on my cellphone. While you are reading it, it just sits there. I have embedded videos into some of the blogs, but they're still not anything you could call "interactive".

What I really enjoy using for educational materials is a spreadsheet application.

There's a link up there to the right that will take you to the download page of my other website. The page is called "Excursions". Most of the free downloads there are programs (like the statistics spreadsheet DANSYS) and their user guides, and LabBooks.

LabBooks are textbooks that are spreadsheet documents. Since they are spreadsheets, they're not flat copy. While you're reading them you can be doing other things, too.

LabBooks are lifelong projects for me. I might not live long enough to finish one, but I place them on my Excursions page when I update them. I just reposted the Mathematics LabBook. I waited until I had completed the first part of the first section. It's about the natural numbers (AKA the whole numbers) and the basis of arithmetic. All those questions I asked above? Read the Mathematics LabBook and you will understand the answers.

It has exercises you can do on the page and some buttons you can push to generate problems and get the answers. And you can do your own calculations in it.

I like to open up a concept and show how the insides work.

There are a few loose ends I need to tie up in the rest of the first section. For instance, I've been saying that I will show you how to memorize long numbers in mental calculations, and I will do that on the next sheet.

Talking about interactive documents, I would think the next wave of educational software might be virtual reality. A housemate is into VR. It makes me dizzy but I can imagine "Mister Wizard in a can." 

Autumn trees

People are talking about going to the mountains for fall colors. I don't understand that. Back East, most of the mountains were covered by deciduous forest which blaze into color during the fall but even there, at the higher altitudes in the Blue Ridge, they turn into alpine forests of assorted evergreens. 

Here, the Rockies gain altitude quickly from east to west and become evergreens and aspen. The aspen provides patches of bright yellow and there are some colorful low shrubs, but most of the color are in the towns where many of the trees are from other parts of the world. 

The photos above are from Centennial, where the residential areas have colored up nicely. The plains host some nice fall colors where there are trees. Willows, cottonwoods, and sumacs grow along streams and produce bright yellows and reds.

The color pigments in tree leaves are associated with sugars that have been stored up in the plants. They're always there but chlorophyll, the pigment that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into stored energy in the form of sugars, is more important to the tree so the green drowns out the other colors. When the Earth tilts away from the sun and trees get ready for less light and colder temperatures, the deciduous trees stop producing as much green chlorophyll before dropping the leaves altogether. Assuming that a landowner doesn't rake up the leaves for a landfill, they rot and add nutrients to the soil for future use.

Last year, I wanted to photograph the Highline Canal Trail in each season. Unfortunately, we didn't have a fall as far as the trees were concerned. To produce sugars and pigments, trees need rain and last year was a rather dry year. It suddenly became cold, the trees went brown, and the leaves came down in a matter of days. 

This year, we're getting colors, so, if you want fall colors, check out the aspens, but also visit the overlooks and view the towns like Kitteridge, Vale, Golden, and Boulder, and don't miss the cities of the plains.

How are the fall colors in your area? Do they seem to be related to the weather, and how? There are many ways to study leaf colors and, for that, I will recommend that you visit the Science Buddies website (https://www.sciencebuddies.org) and search for projects concerning leaf colors.

Get closer: cell phone proximity detector

I like my pocket computer - I'm not crazy about my cellphone (they're the same thing.)

For one thing, I'm old and it still bothers me to overhear people's intimate conversations. It's not like tv that I can turn off. And often there's no telephone in sight. They're wearing a tiny headset. Who are they talking to? Are they talking to me? - an imaginary friend (I hear they're never unkind) - a voice in their head?

But the designers of cell phones have improved some irritating issues. When you are using your cell phone as a phone, it puts all the other apps to sleep so you aren't punching buttons on the desktop while you're talking. It senses when your face is near the faceplate.

The problem with my last phone is that, when I took my face away, it didn't wake up, so I couldn't enter numbers from the keyboard or use other apps to get information. I downloaded an app to disable the sleep mode while I talked on the phone. It was quite unreliable.

My new phone doesn't have that problem. When I get close, the apps go to sleep, and when I take my face away from the phone, the apps wake up.

But how does a cell phone know that your face is close? The answer is "proximeter". All cellphones have them. Usually the proximeter is an infrared LED and detector under the faceplate. You can find it if you have a sensor app like Physics Toolbox or Examobile's Sensors. Both access the proximeter so that you can see when it toggles on and off. Just waggle your finger around in front of the phone until you see the proximeter flip.

I can see the IR LED under the faceplate at the upper left of my phone. The LED constantly shines infrared light out and when an object moves close enough, it reflects the invisible light back to the detector which triggers the proximeter on.

I'll be using my proximeter later to measure periodic events like pendulum swings, so I wanted a more precise idea what to expect from it. It was pretty easy with an optical bench. Home Science Tools (https://www.homesciencetools.com) has an inexpensive one - basically a stand for a ruler and sliders that will carry lenses, a candle, screens, etc. It also has a sliding object, a metal pointer that can be used to form images with lenses and mirrors, or, in my case, a target that I could move toward and away from my phone. With the optical bench, I could measure the distance between the object and the proximeter. I also stuck a plastic pill bottle on the object for a larger target.

Here's my setup.

I used a gooseneck camera stand to position the phone over the ruler.

I made ten measurements with each target moving it toward the phone until the proximeter toggled on, and then away until it toggled off.

I could take the average of ten distances as the "true" distance and the differences between the measured distances and the averages as the amount of error in the measurements.

I found that, for the small target, I could rely on the proximeter to toggle at 5.5 cm ± 0.8 cm. To get it to toggle off, I had to back off to 6.49 cm ± 1 cm. For the large target, the proximeter would toggle on at 4.63 cm ± 1 cm and would toggle off at 6.62 cm ± 1.6 cm.

I was a little surprised that I had to bring the large target closer to get the proximeter to toggle. I assume that the smaller, metal target reflected the infrared light better than the large, white, plastic target.

The errors in the readings behaved. If I added them up, the sum was 0 which means that they were random and followed a normal (or, at least, symmetrical) distribution. So, I can reduce errors in measurements with the proximeter by taking multiple readings and averaging them.

Notice that I had to back off further than I had to approach to make the proximeter toggle. Many control systems show that kind of behavior; it's called hysteresis. If the heat in your house goes above a certain level, your air conditioner will come on, but to make it stop, the temperature has to fall considerably below that level. If the cutoff and cut-on temperatures were the same, the air conditioner would just flip off and on all day.

You can roughly determine how near and far away from your phone you have to move to trigger the proximeter by just moving your hand in front of it, but if you want to use it as a precise instrument, you need to use a set up similar to mine that allows you to make actual distance measurements.

play, learning, and risk

I've told a lot of tales here and they're all true (I swear by my tattoo - movie reference there.) I've talked about being in storms, falling off mountains, and walking until I'm near collapse. I'm a lifelong learner and an adventurer and I've put myself at risk to experience new things. 

In my defense, I will say that I thoroughly educate myself about things I do before I do them. I don't take risks just to take risks. And I prepare for accidents.

Learning involves risks - risk of failure, risk that someone will make fun of you, sometimes actual physical risks. When handling chemicals, fire, or electricity, there's dangers. That's why school labs come with lots of safety instructions. Unfortunately at home, people often don't bother to learn safety tips.

I have often lamented the disappearance of "real" chemistry sets and other science kits. But they seem to be coming back. It's true that there were many things in those old kits that would not even be allowed in children's toys today - including mercury and asbestos. I played with arsenic and explosives. But I'm pleased to see that modern kits like the ones produced by Thames and Cosmos, and Elenco provide lots of safety information.

Still, it's up to folks at home to safeguard their homes if they are going to allow risky play and studies...and there is plenty of research that indicates that we can easily err to one side or the other - challenges or safety (Norton, C., J. Nixon, and J. R. Sibert. 2004. Playground Injuries to Children. Archives of Disease in Childhood. http://adc.bmj.com/pages) (Bond, Michael (2020) From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, MA. Esp. Chapter 2: Right to Roam) (Tierney, John (July 18, 2011) Can a Playground Be Too Safe? New York Times Reports.) Many studies seek a happy medium...safe playgrounds that are also challenging.

I want to thank Me. Colleen Stewart for the following safety resources.

https://www.safehome.org/resources/childproofing-guide/

https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/fire-safety.php

https://www.firstalert.com/community/safety-corner/escape-plan/

https://www.highsecurityhome.org/home-security-measures-that-will-help-people-with-disabilities-stay-safe-at-home/

https://bighappybackyard.com/how-to-make-your-backyard-safe-for-kids/

https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-to-put-on-a-babysitter-checklist-620333

https://www.gspcic.com/learning-center/hurricane-safety/

https://www.belfor.com/en/us/water/staying-safe-during-flood

https://crisisequipped.com/how-to-prepare-for-a-tornado/

https://www.savethechildren.org/us/what-we-do/us-programs/disaster-relief-in-america/earthquake-tips

https://www.ferguson.com/content/emergency-preparedness/wildfire

https://www.almanac.com/news/almanac/musings/power-outages-what-do-when-power-goes-out

And Ms. Stewart's website is:

https://playdatefitness.com/

Part of learning is learning to learn. Learn to be safe in learning. Here is your home safety library.

Rocks, smoke, and chipmunks

It's good to be back on some serious trails again. Badger and I hiked up Independence Peak, in Pence Park, South of Bear Creek and Kitteridge, last week. It was more demanding than Panorama Point being a little further, about a hundred feet more elevation gain, and fewer switchbacks. Still, there were a lot of people out and, if you've been reading this blog, you know that I consider that a plus.

If you're on the Eastern Slope of the Rocky Mountains, you might have noticed a more-golden-than-usual sun lately. When I wrote about sky colors, I neglected to mention that some of the most beautiful (and weird) displays are caused by things you don't want in your lungs. If you've ever seen any of the images from Mars, that sky is the opposite of ours - red during the day and bluish at sunrise and sunset. NASA thinks it has to do with Mars dust, which has magnetite (basically rust) in it.

I sorta felt like I was back in the Great Smoky Mountains.

The forest fires causing this is almost 400 kilometers (over 240 miles) away, but the prevailing winds are from west to east here. I've read that much of the topsoil in Brazil is blown across the Atlantic from the Sahara Desert in northern Africa.

I remember a fire in the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia that made Selma, Alabama look like the woods just outside town were burning.

The Smokies in the Appalachian Mountains were known to be smokey long before Europeans moved in. The valleys and hollows created natural channels that captured and held aerosols from campfires and natural forest fires all over the East. With industrialization, acid rain from nearby Copperhill, Tennessee became a serious problem.

The stars of this trip are these fellas.

Chipmunks were all over the rocks and they seem to have no fear of humans.

How does the wildlife in your area behave around humans? Do wind patterns there collect smoke, dust, or pollution, or do they clear them out? How?

The Rainbow Connection

I guess I've seen a handful of rainbows since I moved to Colorado in 2013. They're not a common occurrence here like they were in the much rainier South. The rain, the sun, and you have to be lined up in a certain way to get a rainbow.

My favorite rainbow memory is from my days as a welder's assistant on a pipeline barge in the Gulf of Mexico. We were installing a riser (the part of the pipeline that connects it to an oil well platform) and it was late on an overcast day. The sky was dark but the horizon was clear and where the sun was setting it was blood red, casting a deep red light across the underside of the clouds. Against that backdrop was a brilliant triple rainbow.

I had to get out our lawn sprinkler to get this one.

Here's how rainbows work. A rainbow is actually a cone. The part you see is where a sheet of rain intersects the cone - it's actually a circle. It looks like a bow because part of it is below the horizon or underground.

The apex of the cone, it's point, is at your anti-solar point. If you draw a line from the sun (don't try this) through your head (right between your eyes) and continue it down into the Earth, that's your solar axis. The anti-solar point is somewhere on the solar axis below you. Now, imagine a cone extending back toward you from that point.

The cone has an angle of 40 (the blue part) to 42 (the red part) degrees - that's the angle at which the light leaves the raindrops). That means that the sun has to have an angle of inclination of 42 degrees or less to see the rainbow. For my rainbow (the sun's angle of inclination is the same as the top of my shadow's angle of declination - only positive.

49.1° ... wait... that's more than 42°.

Hey, okay, notice that my rainbow was formed by a lawn sprinkler and it's below the horizon.

I mentioned that my favorite rainbow was a triple rainbow. If you ever see one of these, pay attention to the order of the colors. In a secondary rainbow, the order is reversed with the blue on top. That's because the light is reflected twice inside the drops. The drops that cause a secondary rainbow are completely different drops and the cone is at 51° to 54° of the anti-solar point.

Triple rainbow? Well, there are a lot of different kinds of rainbows. Some can be formed by light from the sun bouncing off the surface of a lake or the ocean and then hitting rain. If a rainbow is caused by sea mist, salt water has a different index of refraction than fresh water, so the angle of the cone will be different. Also look for rainbows in waterfalls and geysers. And if you're in a plane and see a rainbow in the clouds below you, you may be able to see the whole circle!

Rainbows are special, and rare. If you see one, see if it looks different than the one I described and see if you can figure out what makes it different.

Sunsets and mountains

Suddenly, I'm hiking again. The bug has bitten one of my housemates. We have been to the Lair O'the Bear, between Morrison and Kitteridge, Colorado the last two weekends. At the western end of Bear Creek Canyon, it's a short drive from home and it's near a new favorite restaurant, the Switchback Smokehouse, in Kitteridge (they have an ice cream shop next door!), so it's a great destination for me.

I didn't get many photo-ops the first time. Everything's so big it's hard to get a good picture, but Panorama Point provides some workable views. Here are some of the pictures.

Maidenhair ferns

Penstemon. The main wildflower season is done, but there are still some nice surprises out there. We also saw a lot of anemones but they looked pretty tired.

I don't know why there are things in this tree but it makes an interesting subject. There may have been people rappelling off the Point.

View to the southwest

Kitteridge and, in the distance, Mount Evans

I've also picked up some nice shots from home.

An airplane. We're near Centennial Airport and get a lot of air traffic over our house.

The sunsets have been nice recently.

I'm still working on physics and astronomy excursions and should have something to show for it soon. In the meantime, keep exercising that camera.

Clouds

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now"

Joni Mitchell

Lenticular clouds in Centennial, Colorado.

People have looked for images in clouds for at least as long as humanity has been recording it's activities.

I lived most of my life in the Southeast United States leaving only for a construction job in Montana, four trips to or through Denver (and the states I passed through on the way), and two seasons on a laybarge in the Gulf of Mexico. But I've seen some weather.

Every area has its distinctive weather. The reason we could predict our weather with any certainty in Alabama was that it was coming from where I live now, Colorado, and we had plenty of time to see it coming.

As each area has its characteristic weather, each has its characteristic clouds.

The massive high-topped thunderheads with anvil shaped tops are rare here. We get a lot more hail; they get a lot more tornadoes. They also get hurricanes.

We get these weird lenticular clouds like the ones in the picture above.

As air flows across the Rockies and out over the plains, it can set off standing waves, like those that form when a person blows across the top of a soda bottle. At the bottom of the waves, the air is warm and can hold moisture as invisible vapor, but when the air is carried to the top of the waves, it cools off and releases the water as cloud droplets. A person from the east might think "rain coming," but these are actually stable weather clouds, like the big fluffy cumulus clouds of the Southern summer.

Those Southern cumulus clouds could build up into far from stable cumulonimbus clouds. I had one drop a tornado into a farmer's field next to where I was driving once. I didn't usually speed. I did that time. Clouds can cause you to get excited.

I was driving near Tuskegee, Alabama on I 75 and there was this huge thunderhead over me. The bottom was flat and it looked like I could reach up and touch it. It was electric blue. There was so much water in the cloud that it piped the color of the sky above it right down to the bottom. That's the kind of cloud that can drop a tornado down right on top of you without any warning.

The funny thing is that I saw so much storm activity before I became a storm watcher about five years before my retirement and never saw sign of another tornado, not even during the disastrous outbreak of 2011.

One of the weirdest cloud formations I have ever seen were the hole-punch clouds one summer in Selma. An even sheet of clouds had big circular holes in it, all the way up to clear blue. We didn't know what caused them back then. It turns out that planes flying through clouds can cause droplets to coalesce, like when you put a drop of detergent in a bowl of greasy water.

The most beautiful display of weather I have seen was a very darkly overcast afternoon on a laybarge. There was a clear band on the horizon where the sun was setting blood red. It cast a red glow over the bottom of the clouds and there was a brilliant triple rainbow.

I've been chased up Mount Carbon three times by thunderstorms. Walking east from Morrison on the Bear Creek Trail carries you through a broad, treeless area of Bear Creek Lakes Park. With no cover behind me and no cover and a lung busting switchback before me, I heard a rumble at my back and turned to see massive black clouds boiling up over Mount Falcon. There was green-ness in them, indicating hail, which I didn't want on me, so I walked fast.

All three times I reached the shelter at Mountain View before the storm hit.

What causes cloud colors. Well, I talked about sunrise and sunset clouds in the last blog. Why are clouds white and, of all colors, dark gray? Is water gray?

We talked about Rayleigh and Mei scattering last time. Mei scattering is caused by aerosols, particles that aren't molecules but they're still small enough to stay suspended in air. And remember that Mei scattering doesn't pick and choose specific wavelengths of light like Rayleigh scattering does, so it's not surprising when clouds are white, but gray?

A few years ago, I built a Joly Photometer. It's basically two chunks of paraffin separated by aluminum foil. Here it is.

If you put a standard light source on one side and a light source of unknown brightness on the other, then move the unknown source nearer or further away until both sides of the Photometer look the same, you can calculate from the difference in distances of the light sources from the photometer how bright the unknown source is.

But notice that the two halves, which are from the same slab of wax and, therefore, the same color, look different. The apparent color is from the white light illuminating the wax. The top slab is lit by more white light ..therefore, whiter.

Clouds are the same way. Less light makes its way down through the cloud so places with less light look less white and our eyes are rigged to emphasize contrasts so, next to the bright white of the tops of the cloud, the bottom sometimes looks positively black.

Notice that the gray parts of clouds are usually a cool gray until sunset. The blue of the sky also comes through misty clouds.

If you ever visit the Great Smoky Mountains, you will see that they, indeed, do look smokey. That area has always funneled aerosols in, hardwood tree pollen, smoke, and more recently, abundant industrial pollutants and they disperse white light efficiently. Add in the sky blue and there's smoky mountains.

Green clouds are a place where light has to pass through so much dispersion that all the blue is gone. Notice that it's a sorta dirty brown, meaning that light at the red end of the spectrum is there, too . Clouds with that much water and ice in them will often mean hail. I run from those! Mother Nature doesn't want me there.

Hail forms in clouds with strong updrafts. High up in cumulonimbus clouds, water freezes into tiny ice crystals until they are too heavy to remain suspended in the air and then they start to fall, but they get caught in the updraft and are blown back up. They pick up more moisture and freeze another layer. These little balls of ice will ride winds up and down until they're no longer little balls of ice. When they finally fall to the ground, they can be destructively big balls of ice!

Cloud watching is a great pastime. You can get a good idea of what to expect of the weather in your area and, occasionally, you'll see something rare and spectacular!

What about that sky color?

There are a couple of hints as to why the sky is blue that are easy to obtain.

First, look straight up through a polarized sunglasses lens. Rotate the lens and see what happens. You'll see it lighten and darken. Second, note that the sky is not always blue. There's a definite sequence of colors as the day progresses: reds and oranges, yellows, blues, then the reverse.

What polarizes light? Reflection! When light bounces off something, it comes off organized. That's what causes glare and glare is why there are polarized sunglasses to start with.

Light is sorta complicated and maybe you don't want the excruciating details, but, at base, it's a wave (like ocean waves) made up of electric and magnetic fields. The fields move at right angles to each other. The waves can be oriented in any direction and they are when they leave the sun.

But when light hits a surface, whether it's a molecule or a lake, it's absorbed by the atoms in the surface. Some of the atoms send out light when they calm down, sometimes in a different color but often unchanged. Different materials are better at this than others. That's why metals reflect better than glass.

But the gas molecules in the atmosphere absorb and re-emit sunlight and the light they re-emit is polarized. Although molecules tend to be neutrally charged overall, most of them have different charges in different places. Remember that like charges repel so molecules next to each other tend to drive each other's electrons away from each other. So molecules tend to organize themselves. I say "tend to" because it's not a strong phenomenon and not all the molecules in air are lined up like a high school marching band. But light coming off these molecules also tends to be lined up. It's called Rayleigh scattering.

Here's a shot of the sky through a polarizing filter.

After turning the filter ninety degrees, it looks like this.

Notice the gradation of light toward the sun. There is another kind of scattering in the atmosphere. Mie scattering is from larger particles: dust and other aerosols like water droplets. A big difference between Mie and Rayleigh scattering is that Rayleigh scattering is affected by light wavelengths. The shorter wavelengths (violet, indigo, blue) are scattered more than the longer wavelengths (red, orange, yellow). Mie scattering disperses all the colors about the same. 

Space is black and the sun is almost white. As sunlight comes into our atmosphere, ultraviolet (eaten up largely by ozone in the upper atmosphere), violet, and indigo goes first. What reaches us is blue. As a spot on the Earth rotates away from the sun, light has to travel through more atmosphere to reach it. Green drops out, but you can't see much green since it's still mixed with a lot of blue. Yellow drops out, and then you get the oranges and reds of the sunset.

Keep in mind that the same sun creating beautiful sunsets over the Rockies is creating a blue California sky at the same time.

The sky closer to the sun looks whiter due to Mie scattering. So that's why the sky looks blue...and white and orange and red…

So, using color filters.

Filters have a coding system that looks rather arcane. I mentioned it in the last blog. The filter I used was a CTO ¼ 6500 to 4500 K ½ f/stop gel correction filter.

CTO stands for "color temperature orange". There are also CTB (color temperature blue) and "plus green" or "minus green" filters. CTB filters are specifically there to make tungsten light look like sunlight. They "cool down" yellowish light. CTB does the opposite. I wanted to take blue out of my picture so I needed a warmer filter. ¼ is just the strength of the color change. ¼ is a light colored filter.

The K number is color temperature. All bodies above absolute zero have molecules that vibrate - that's what heat is - vibrating molecules. And if molecules are vibrating, so are the charges within them. Moving charges are what causes magnetic fields. Moving magnetic fields create electric fields and when magnetic and electric fields start moving together, you get electromagnetic fields - light.

Relatively cool bodies like a summer sidewalk (see my blog for Friday, August 30, 2019, "Trail temperature vs. air temperature") might seem hot, but they're not hot enough to glow. But they are giving off light in the invisible, infrared range.  Infrared light is how heat is radiated because when infrared light hits matter, the matter heats up. 

As objects get hotter, they begin to glow a dull red, then orange, then yellow, then blue, and then they go white. The K number in filters stands for "Kelvin" as in "Lord Kelvin" after whom the Kelvin temperature scale, preferred by scientists, is named. The K number is the color that most closely resembles the color given off by a hot body around that temperature. A hot body from 6500 K to 4500 K will give off a yellow color. Larger numbers denote bluer colors, smaller numbers mean redder colors.

The f/stop is how much light the filter lets through. On a camera, the f-stop is the ratio of the lens' focal length to the diameter of the aperture. That might sound complicated but remember that the camera's focal length is related to its light gathering power and the larger the aperture, the more light can get in, so the smaller the f/stop number, the larger the aperture, and the more light is passed through.

An f/stop of ½ does not mean that half the light gets through. It's actually a very light filter that lets a lot of light through. An f/stop of, say, 8 would be much darker.

Correction or compensation filters tend to be pretty light. There are also color filters that are intended to really alter the color of photographs for special effects. They cut out a lot more light in specific colors. There are also neutral filters that just cut light in all wavelengths, polarizing filters, and special effects filters like diffraction gratings that give you rainbows.

Some photographic filters are made of glass or thick plastic. Gels are thin plastic films. I like them because they're inexpensive but they do the job and the thicker filters are harder to mount on my cell phone. I just slip the gel between my camera lens and the phone case and I'm ready to go.

The sky is what you have to look through to do astronomy so, if you're interested in sky watching, it behooves you to understand the weather.

Can I trust my phone? Part 2

A while back, I downloaded an app that would do spectrometry. It would split light coming into the camera into its constituent "rainbow", which is cool since that is a way to analyze a substance. Each element has a rainbow fingerprint.

I was excited! I wondered if the representations of incandescent elements on the Internet would be true enough to create a faithful spectrum, so Zi pulled up a picture of a hydrogen lamp and looked at it with the spectrometer. Hydrogen has a very well known spectrum so I knew what it was supposed to look like. 

Wow! It looked great!...except…why was all that blue there? Hydrogen isn't supposed to have that big blue spike at the left end of it's rainbow.

I took my phone outside and looked at the sky through it's camera  Wow! Blue skies smilin' at me...way too blue skies, did I see. I was blue. I dumped the app.

It wasn't the app's fault. Phone cameras are made to produce pretty pictures and bluer skies are prettier. But they're not true blue and science looks for truth.

My son suggested that I use a yellow filter to remove some of the blue coming into the camera and then use the color balance on the camera to get back to true color, and it worked! On the hydrogen spectrum, it worked, but on everything else, it removed so much blue that I couldn't put any back in. blue again!

But recently I bought a packet of Selens Flight Flash Color Strobist Lighting Gel filters. Gels are plastic films. Less expensive than glass photographic filters, they're often used as compensation filters for different light sources. Slipping the ¼ CTO 6500 to 4500 K lightly yellow correction filter over the camera lens, between the phone and it's case did a great job. I used the SnailCamera Pro app, which gives me considerable color balance control to rebalance the picture and I "eyeballed" it until it looked right.

Here's what the camera saw without the picture.

Here's what the scene actually looked like.

Okay, a caveat. The colors were right but I lost some detail. The individual stones in the chimney lost some definition, but right now I'm more concerned with color values. I think some contrast adjustment could get some, if not all, of the definition back.

But I am impressed with the light capturing abilities of modern cell phones. Here are some early evening pictures I took.

A nice sunset

The same shot after the sun had gone away.

A star. Vega. I could not have seen that with my last cellphone camera.

Cell phones offer a lot of power to record your world but know your instrument. It's primary purposes are communication and entertainment. Accurate records require some finagling.

Interlude

From the instant of its creation, the universe has been in the process of running down. It's called "entropy". To quote African writer Achinua Achebe and Irish poet William Butler Yeats, "Things fall apart." Except for some miracle - a Big Crunch or the Creator's decision that it's time to wipe the old slate clean and create a new, the inexorable March to uniformity will lead, in a few billion years, to a vast ocean of hydrogen, atoms so far separated that there will be no opportunity for them to crash together to form anything more complex.

But there is turbulence in time. Diversity feeds on itself. As long as things actively fall apart, they also fall together. There are swirls in entropy that pushes it, through sheer momentum against itself. One quality of living things is that they transform. They create order out of disorder. The inert dust and muck around us fall together, against all probability, to form...us.

Life isn't the only builder. There's also chaos. Nature decrees that matter attracts matter and, when enough gas and dust is pulled together, the crushing results begin compacting hydrogen into helium and then larger atoms, under fantastic heat, until the energy is expended. The heaviest element that can be created in a star is iron, but the death throes of a star, the nova, is incredibly energetic, crushing even more atoms together to form brilliant spectacles in the sky, destroying everything in the cosmic neighborhood, and blowing out clouds of element rich dust to settle down on the universe.

The dust we see in a sun beam is mostly the detritus of life - dead microorganisms, and in our homes, skin cells sloughed off our own bodies and the tiny creatures that eat them. But a significant portion is micrometeorites, much of it, that fine dust blown out by dying stars. Over millions of years it has settled on Earth along with the usual products of erosion and, in the molten mix of tectonic plates, heavy elements concentrate in globs of magma to be extruded in cracks near (in geological terms) the surface where it can cool into rich veins of ore.

It might have happened in the crash of two such plates in the Earth's crust that buckled, what would be North America, thousands of feet upward to form the Colorado plateau. Or maybe before. That wasn't the first time the crust had been buckled around here. The Appalachians once rivaled the Himalayas in grandeur but, over time, they were worn down to the narrow band of mountains they are today. The Ozarks had their time.

But time has been working on the Wild West, too, eroding the smooth skyland of Colorado into deep ravines between towering mountains, dissolving ore veins into acidic, carbon dioxide rich lakes (the product of acid rains and dying organisms) where lead precipitated out into insoluble lead carbonate, cerussite, carrying other heavy elements with it, including silver. 

Nature values nothing. She just acts. But the new (in geological terms) animal invading the continent of North America brought a brain that valued much, especially that which is rare and that which glitters...and silver is both rare and glittery. Those that came from the east recognized the white sands below the highest mountain of the North American Rockies, Mount Elbert, to be composed of cerussite and understood that it often carries silver.

When that was confirmed, the new town of Leadville, Colorado, founded in 1860, began attracting miners and miners attracted other civilized creatures like the faro dealing Doc Holliday, fellow Georgian turned Coloradan (he's now buried in Glenwood Springs), and the unsinkable Molly Brown...

and myself. Yesterday, two friends and I, taking a break from stargazing and pendulum watching, traveled to this interesting little village below Mount Elbert to look at saloons and city halls preserved for posterity and tiny homes. And here are some pictures.

Mine dumps and mountains

The Old Church on Harrison Avenue and Mount Elbert.

Lake in the mountains

My personal transportation for several years has been the trains and buses around Denver but with Covid-19, I've avoided them since they require a mask and it's hard for me to get enough air through a mask.

I still walk to the shops in the area. There are always interesting things on the way.

One of my favorite wildflowers, the common milkweed, is blooming now.

Purple seems to be in vogue. This is Colorado and thistles are everywhere.

These rare gems are a variation of the Mallows that are everywhere. They're called "cowboy's delight" or "copper Mallows." It's strange to think of them so closely related to hollyhock, hibiscus, and marsh mallow (yes, marshmallows were originally a plant product, made by whipping up the thick, starchy solution from marsh mallow roots.)

We've been having moist air coming over the Rockies, giving us occasional rain storms to cool off our afternoons.

The public library has been closed for remodeling and now, with Covid 19, will it ever open? Stay tuned.

Much of our weather has a lot to do with the jet stream that shifts like an injured snake over us and the Rocky Mountains to the west. I've flown over the Rockies in a jet and from up there, they don't look quite so big and, after all, what's 14,000 foot mountains when the atmosphere is well over a million feet thick.

But when a tsunami is far out at sea, you can only measure a small change in the surface of the ocean. It's only when the depth changes that the sea turns into a great wall of water.

When air masses flow over the mountains and then out over the plains, they can set up vibrations. As the moist air moves upward, it cools off and water condenses out in the form of clouds. The air at the bottom of the waves is clear.  We get interesting rows or hatches of clouds. Sometimes, they're said to look like UFOs. Technically, they're called "lenticular clouds" for their resemblance to lenses.

Little Dry Creek is up now. It's not a mountain Creek, so it's not from snow melt. It's being fed by the afternoon showers and there seems to be a lag time between the rain and the rise in water level. I'll have to check that out sometime.

All walks are interesting. If you stay aware of your surroundings, there will be plenty to engage you.