Starfish Prime

 

Safe and away.

Twice in one day I have heard references to Starfish Prime. First in my plasma physics course and second in a paper on electromagnetic resonances in the earth-ionosphere cavity.

So I looked it up.

Starfish Prime was one in a series of high altitude nuclear tests. This particular one was detonated over 400km, well into the ionosphere. The EM pulse wiped out many low earth satellites, it destroyed electronics in nearby Hawaii and lunched a bunch of radioactive particles into space along the earth’s magnetic field lines.

The one good thing it did was introduce a lot of radioactive tracers into the inner radiate belt, thus allowing for the lifetime of particles in the belt to be measured.

Otherwise the thought of high altitude nuclear tests is a bit worrisome.

 

Phone Photos

 

Delicate camera controls.

Sometimes I see a great photo opportunity but do not have my camera, especially when it is raining out. So I fall back to my phone if it is not raining that hard.

When I do I immediately remember why I bought a DSLR. In the above photo I could have gotten it right with a few more photos except it was raining fairly consistently on my phone. I am also always surprised at the wide angle of phone cameras.

 

Traffics

Hybrids are probably better for traffic then my car.

A sudden revelation came to me while sitting morosely in traffic: traffics are compression waves!

This thought made me want to simulate traffic in a 1D or maybe 2D particle model. The cars on the road have a given linear density of car and so the rate at which braking is propagated back is much higher then the individual car velocity.

The best time to see the traffic compression waves is approaching an uphill slope at night, then the brake lights can travel down the line of traffic eventually to your own car.

Maybe some more time stuck in traffic at night will help flesh out the model of traffic waves.

Simple

Easy to set up.

Windows 7 is finally all set up on my Macbook Pro through both Bootcamp and Parallels.

A few thing that caught me up in the installation:

• Partitioning a large part of the hard drive could be difficult if you have large files that are frequently used, for me my XP Parallels files prevented me from partitioning my main hard drive.
• Use the Bootcamp Assistant to start the installation process, otherwise everytime the installer restarts you will start to boot in OS X.
• If installing the Student Upgrade edition it will only accept the License Key if the install detects a previous version of windows when it initially starts up. Install Windows 7 once then install again over it to get the product key to work (I had to wipe my XP Bootcamp before installing).
• An “Untitled” Bootcamp partition can be renamed by changing the name of the C:/ drive on the Windows side.
• Backup everything. After a clean install of Windows 7 is working use WinClone to back it up.

My only real complaint about Bootcamp and Windows 7 is that the trackpad tap to click is much more sensitive then in OS X.

Lates

Greenlake sunset.

A post-rain sunset.

Installing Windows 7

Windows, more then seven.

I downloaded Windows 7 Professional 64bit Upgrade last night using the student discount. I tried to get it to work today. It has not been easy and it is not working yet.

The current problem is that I want to repartition my OS X hard drive but it won’t let me create a partition past the 40GB point and I want a 60GB partition. So i will need to reformat and reload the hard drive. There were other issues such as created the ISO and the CD-Key which I hope that I found solutions for.

Now I am leaving it for the weekend because I need a steady computer for tomorrow and some Matlab code needs to run overnight.

My Mistake

Look at that motion blur.

So yesterday I complained a little about how there was a lack of anonymity with the Seattle ballot. I even went as far to suggest a solution such as an extra envelope to put in the big one.

Well it looks like someone has a time machine because I was cleaning my desk this morning and found the security envelope for my ballot, all my complaints had no grounding.

The morale here: when pulling papers out of desk piles also grab the adjacent layers to get an accurate picture of the layer of interest.

Seattle Vote

Only motorcyclist can exhibit Extreme Caution!

I filled out my ballot for the city of Seattle and King county elections. I am not sure if it is Washington or just this county but it is all vote by mail. The only small problem I have with this is that the envelope to return the ballot is labeled with my name and address. I know that I had to sign the CA absentee ballot but I don’t remember if it had my name and address.

While I don’t feel the need for anonymity for this election it is not something that I want to give up. I know that they probably separate out the ballots from the envelopes using one for elections and another to keep track of voter fraud but it would be nice if there was another way to do it. Maybe do a double envelope, with the ballet sealed within the outer envelope that has the name and signature on it. That way they can be sorted without seeing who is voting for what.

As my first Washington election it is pretty simply, there were no long winded, poorly written propositions posed by a small group like in California. Though the county by county results of various propositions are always fun to view.

Jackson Problems

One of the Greenlake docks.

Graduate Physics Electromagnetism is know as being difficult. In particular it has been noted among many who have taken the series that the homework can be slightly challenging at times. Most of this arrises from the pervasive usage of the Jackson text Classical Electrodynamics.

Unfortunately for me I now look forward to Jackson problems as they are easier then the ones my professor writes. If not easier they have easier to access help online in the way of physics forums and even posted solutions to some of the problem (though this rarely help).

Overall I have decided I dislike problems that involves words like ‘proof’, ‘prove’ and ‘corollary’. Especially if they are all in the same sentence.

Serious Rain

Seattle actually had real rain.

It has been raining off and on over the past week in Seattle. No surprise there really. Yesterday though it really rained, in that world flooding sort of way. This is the sort of rain that I love, sheets of water falling from the sky, streets flooding just a little bit on the sides and water pelting against the windows.

It is rain with character.