Saturday, February 9, 2013
Winter in San Diego...
Just a random collection of photos from today's travels, mainly on the western face and North Peak of Cuyamaca Mountain. I'll bet that these don't comport with most people's notion of winter in San Diego :)
RIP John Karlin – the First UX Guy...
For the non-geeks amongst my readers: “UX” is the currently popular abbreviation for “User Experience”, and denotes an engineer whose focus is on the human factors of a system's user. UX engineers are most often thought of as part of software development teams, but in fact they're also often part of hardware teams.
John Karlin was arguably the first UX guy, and he was focused on telephone design...
John Karlin was arguably the first UX guy, and he was focused on telephone design...
Curiosity Discovers Something Odd on Mars...
What is it? It looks metallic. The mission scientists don't know yet what it is, other than weird. But they're working on it...
Prepare Carefully Before Viewing This Video...
I suggest something soft and cushiony directly under your jaw, to catch it when it drops:
The product's web site...
The product's web site...
Well, That Didn't Last Long...
The lead on this WSJ ($) article pretty much sums it up:
Doom...
Well, that didn't take long. The pension reforms that California Governor Jerry Brown signed in September have been in effect for all of a month, and Democrats are already seeking a partial annulment. The Kim Kardashian-Kris Humphries marriage had more staying power.California – a shining example of how socialism (in the guise of “progressivism”) can reduce a vibrant symbol of human success to a smoldering economic ruin. Quickly, too.
State assemblyman Luis Alejo (D., Teamsters) wants to exempt some 20,000 mass transit workers on the pretext that the new pension law violates the 1964 Urban Mass Transportation Act...
Doom...
Oops: Sunspot Count Lower than Projected - Unexpectedly!
If you've been tracking the debate on the sun's influence on climate, then you know that (somewhat counter-intuitively) the sun's luminosity (energy output) increases when there are more sunspots (see here for an explanation). For years, climate scientists left solar luminosity variation out of their models, and denied that it had any significant effect on weather or climate. Skeptics of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have long been pointing to the high sunspot counts (and therefore high solar luminosity) of the last solar cycle as a likely cause of the global warming observed in the '90s and early '00s. Over the past couple of years, even the mainstream climate scientists are changing their position on this, as more and more observational evidence comes in that the skeptics were right.
Meanwhile, over at NOAA they've been trying to predict what the current solar cycle's sunspot count will be, and they keep getting surprised – by how low the count is (see chart below, sourced here). At the same time, all observational evidence of continued global warming has come to a halt – temperatures have been flat for over five years now. AGW skeptics point to this as evidence that the solar luminosity is causing global warming, but really all they have so far is a good correlation; causation has yet to be established. But...some mainstream climate scientists are now pursuing observations aimed to establishing that causation (see, for example, the recent observations showing that solar luminosity variation in the ultraviolet spectrum is far higher than it is in optical – and the energy output of the sun is much higher in that spectral region than it is in the optical region).
Meanwhile, over at NOAA they've been trying to predict what the current solar cycle's sunspot count will be, and they keep getting surprised – by how low the count is (see chart below, sourced here). At the same time, all observational evidence of continued global warming has come to a halt – temperatures have been flat for over five years now. AGW skeptics point to this as evidence that the solar luminosity is causing global warming, but really all they have so far is a good correlation; causation has yet to be established. But...some mainstream climate scientists are now pursuing observations aimed to establishing that causation (see, for example, the recent observations showing that solar luminosity variation in the ultraviolet spectrum is far higher than it is in optical – and the energy output of the sun is much higher in that spectral region than it is in the optical region).
Weather...
My readers on the East Coast or in colder regions of the world should feel perfectly free to laugh at us. But...we're having a rare episode of frozen precipitation here. Not snow, but hail – lots and lots of slushy hail, about the size of corn kernels. Overnight we have a few places where this mixture has accumulated to over an inch (2 cm) deep. The ground is not frozen, and the air temperature never reached freezing, so these accumulations are all on objects that provide good insulation from the ground (some photos later).
Meanwhile, we also got three quarters of an inch (about 1.5 cm) of rain. After a parched January we're under average rainfall for the season, so every little bit of additional precipitation is quite welcome.
Debbie and I are headed off to our local mountains for some sight-seeing later. I'm bringing my camera, so if we see anything interesting there will be photos!
Meanwhile, we also got three quarters of an inch (about 1.5 cm) of rain. After a parched January we're under average rainfall for the season, so every little bit of additional precipitation is quite welcome.
Debbie and I are headed off to our local mountains for some sight-seeing later. I'm bringing my camera, so if we see anything interesting there will be photos!