K-Squared Ramblings

Missing Posts Found

Five posts since last weekend didn’t show up properly in the feed, so if you’re following by RSS or LiveJournal, you probably missed these:

• No, They Don’t Read — A study finds out just how little people actually read on the web.
• Hazards of DRM on Music (or video, or any other media) — If the DRM provider ever shuts down (as Microsoft is shutting down PlaysForSure), the tracks you bought will be a waste of bits.
• Efficiency at the DMV — no, really!
• Weirdest Spam Yet — It’s NOT your fault that your spells and rituals aren’t turning out like you want… YET.
• Judging a Book’s Cover — Historical novels that reuse the same covers, sometimes many times over.

(For the record: the GMT timestamps were set to zero. It seems to be this problem, probably triggered by turning on the XCache-based object cache last weekend. I’ve applied a patch, so let’s see if it works.)

Efficiency at the DMV

Yes, I’m shocked as well. This morning I had to go into the Department of Motor Vehicles for the first time in several years, and was surprised to find that they’d actually worked out a very efficient system for handling people as they came in. I don’t know if this is standard across the California DMV, or if it’s specific to the Laguna Hills office, but I was impressed.

It’s a 2-stage system, starting with a single line, then a set of take-a-number queues running in parallel.

1. Everyone starts in a single line leading to a “Directory” desk. The clerk at this desk handles initial questions and hands out the appropriate forms.
2. You fill out the forms, then go back to the desk without standing in line again.
3. The directory desk assigns you a number in one of several queues, depending on the type of service you need (ID, license, registration, testing, etc.).
4. They call your number and send you to an open window.

The thing that impressed me was step 2. They have you fill out the forms before they assign you to a queue. That means that you won’t get caught half-way through the form when your number is called, so clerks at the windows don’t have to wait around while you finish filling things out. That means they can handle more people in the same amount of time.

The only problem I noticed with this part of the system was that it wasn’t clear where to go if you had an appointment.

Well, that and the occasional clueless visitor. I felt really stupid after marveling at the simple optimization, then discovering when I got to the window that I’d missed a section.

Rainbow Feather Cloud

On my way back to work after lunch today, I looked out the window and saw this feathery wisp of cloud with a clear rainbow pattern running from red at the the top to violet in the middle, then turning plain white below.

As I drove south, the colors moved down the cloud, disappearing entirely by the time I got back. By the time I could safely snap a photo, it was already more or less midway down the cloud.

I believe it’s a fragment of a circumhorizon arc, judging by the description:

Look for a circumhorizon arc near to noon near to the summer solstice when the sun is very high in the sky (higher than 58°). It lies well below the sun — twice as far from it (two hand spans) as the 22º halo.

The arc is a very large halo and is close to, and parallel to the horizon. Usually only fragments are visible where there happen to be cirrus clouds.

We’re still 2 months from the summer solstice, but it was 12:38 PM DST (half an hour before true noon), and the sun was apparently near 70.6° high. (The site is aimed at UK visitors, after all.) It also looked too far away from the sun to be part of the 22º halo, plus of course the colors were more well-defined.

This also points out the should-be-obvious fact that ice crystals can still form in the upper atmosphere even when it’s warm — say, 90°F — on the ground, so there’s no need to limit halo-hunting to winter.

I recommend checking out Atmospheric Optics’ additional pictures of circumhorizon arcs, most of which are more complete than this one. Some of them quite spectacular and must have been really impressive to see live.

Under Construction Indefinitely

We went to Wayzgoose at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

Stringy Clouds at Sunset

Sunset on Tuesday, March 25th, with feathery cirrus clouds and contrails. A faint sundog is visible as a slight brightening at the level of the sun, about 2/3 of the way across the picture.

Sunset

View from the office parking lot earlier this evening:

Contrail Contrast

I had to get up early today, early enough that I could still see a couple of stars (or more likely planets, but I’ve lost track of where most of them are right now). When I got to work, I was treated to the sight of these contrails lit up against the morning sky. The rising sun was still behind the mountains, below the frame.

Look at the cloud directly above the contrail on the right, near the leaves. You’ll see a dark nearly-vertical line, which I initially took for a contrail’s shadow, possibly even the one below it. A minute or so later, though, it looked like it might have actually been another contrail, one not lit up by the sun and therefore darker than the cloud behind it.

Oddly enough, half an hour later the entire area was blanketed in fog.

Golden to Green

Back in October, shortly before the Santiago Fire, I went sightseeing in the Tustin Foothills and snapped a picture of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. A month later, I took a picture of the same view after the fire and posted the two as a before and after comparison.

Well, we’ve had several months of normal (for SoCal) rain, and the hills have turned green. Mostly. It’s clear that the scars from the fire are going to take at least another season to heal. The last couple of days have been very clear, so I went back to the same spot to take a “four months later” photo.

March 10, 2008. Click for a larger version

Now compare it to the November (post-fire) and October (pre-fire) photos: Read the rest of this entry »

Halos and Rainbows and Clouds, Oh My!

Whenever there’s a light layer of cirrus clouds in the sky, I keep an eye out for halos. I catch the occasional iridescent cloud, or a faint sundog that’s only visible through sunglasses. Today I spotted a 22° halo as I walked back to my car after lunch, around 2:00pm on March 6.

It’s not as sharp as the one I caught 2 years ago, but there was more color. It was clearly reddish toward the inside and bluish toward the outside. Like last time, I didn’t have the good camera, just my cell phone, but at least this time it was a better phone!

This reminds me, our trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago was through patchy clouds, sun, and rain—perfect for rainbows. We spotted several, including one which was not only extremely bright, but actually showed supernumaries inside the band.

We saw this on Thursday, February 21, somewhere between Paso Robles and San Jose along US Highway 101. Katie remarked that it looked almost double-layered, I looked over, and said, “Grab the camera! It has fringes!”

I’d never seen, or never noticed supernumaries before. I’d never even heard of them until I was reading through Atmospheric Optics a few years ago. If you look on this color-enhanced picture (actually from another photo of the same rainbow), you can see several extra bands inside the violet arc, alternating green and pink.

The really weird thing? Classical optics doesn’t explain them. Refraction and reflection can only explain the red-to-violet band and the secondary bands that sometimes appear outside the main arc. These are actually wave interference patterns that occur if the water droplets are small enough.

On a related note, last Sunday (March 2) I saw what I’m fairly certain was a lenticular cloud, except it didn’t look remotely like a lens. It was just a long, narrow flat cloud floating above the Santa Ana Mountains. I noticed it around 3:00 in the afternoon, and a couple of very thin, also flat clouds above it, and thought it looked like the beginnings of the stack formation. What clinched it was the fact that the cloud was still there, 5 hours later (visible at night by reflected city light), despite the high Santa Ana winds. You know, after spotting two sets last summer, it looks like they form in Orange County a lot more often than I thought.

Corona

Spotted this on Thursday, between rain showers. It’s a slightly distorted corona, formed by diffraction of sunlight around cloud droplets, splitting the spectrum and producing rainbow-like colors. According to the Atmospheric Optics site, the distortion indicates that the droplet size varies across different parts of the cloud.

This was shot through a window, and I’m 99% certain that the straight line running down the middle of the darker foreground cloud is a reflection from inside the room.

San Gabriel Snow Panorama

We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Green and Brown

While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds had rolled in and turned everything gray. I kept checking back every so often, but the closest I got was this:

It’s been great to have a more normal amount of rain this year. The coastal hills all turned green after the second rainstorm, early in December. The hills up by the mountains took longer, since most of the area had burned off in the Santiago fire. Faint patches of green started to appear around Christmas, and now, the lower hills at least are more green than brown.

The scenery still looks odd, though. There’s a third peak (Flores?) near Saddleback, about 1,000 feet lower, that normally blends in with the mountain behind it. Well, the entire north face of the hillside burned. Then high winds blew the ashes away. People coated it with a green-gray material that I suspect was intended to prevent mudslides (it looked like the stuff they spray on dirt embankments in construction projects before the landscaping kicks in). It rained, repeatedly. Then we had high winds again, clearing all the gunk out of the air…and now it’s got the light brown color normally seen on the lower, closer hills during the dry season, instead of the darker brown of the mountains. It doesn’t blend at all, even from as far away as Tustin.

This was taken from in front of the Ralphs on Jamboree on January 13. You can see the line of hills in front is still a green/brown mix, and then there’s this light brown lump rising up behind them. On the left side you can see some remnants of the anti-erosion substance.

The following day, on my way to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum (7 miles away, and perhaps a 30-degree difference in angle), I went over a bridge and saw Saddleback next to the Ferris wheel. I knew I had to get that shot.

I parked in the west parking structure, then went running around the top floor looking for a spot where I could frame the wheel and the mountains together, and avoid too many light poles, and get above the few cars, and not have to worry that losing my balance would cause me to fall 3 stories to my death. I finally climbed onto one of the support pillars for the light poles in the middle of the deck, where if I fell I’d only fall a few feet.

Here, you can really see the difference between the areas that burned and those that didn’t. Compare this to the third picture in Saddleback Snow, or the second in Ashen Mountains.

Sadly, the best places to take photos from seem to be the middles of freeway bridges and tops of private buildings — in other words, inaccessible.

Tin Star

Found this on the side of the road when I went out to take the “snow” picture.

Actually it reminds me of some broken amulet in something I read, or something I watched. Not the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, but something else. I can’t quite place it.

Saddleback Snow: Don’t Blink

There was a little snow on Mt. Saddleback on Sunday, but not much worth mentioning. Sometime early Tuesday morning, though, a freak storm seems to have hit the mountain… and only the mountain. We certainly didn’t get any rain down here in the flatlands.

At 8:20, the mountains were still shrouded in clouds:

By 9:00, the clouds were starting to burn off, leaving behind a coat of snow, not just on Santiago and Modjeska peaks (still behind clouds), but on the lower peaks to the northwest.

By noon, most of the snow had melted. There’s still some in the shadowed crevices.

Yes, Snow!

After the last few days of rain, today was clear and windy. I finally dragged myself out to a vantage point where I could see something of the mountains… just at sunset. This is looking northeast toward the San Gabriel Mountains from the edge of a vacant lot on the former MCAS Tustin. (You can see one of the two blimp hangars at the right.)

Update: Monday morning I went back to the same spot before work and took some photos in daylight. Katie said it looked like someone had sifted powdered sugar over the mountains.

Back to Sunday evening, I crossed the street and got some more pictures without the fence and saplings in the foreground, and stayed out until the light had faded. The view was clear all the way west along the range to Mt. Wilson. I also looked back toward the sunset, which lit up the edges of a cloud with a red-gold glow.