Randy’s Blog

Driveway

We didn't get much snow in December. Only about 3 inches. In fact, the last several years, Chicago has gotten more snow in April than in December, and there's a good chance that streak continues this year.

Most of those 3 inches of snow fell on December 30; it started as rain and sleet before transitioning to snow. Wendy and I didn't have anywhere to go that week, so I didn't bother shoveling the driveway the next day. I really regret that now! There's been a solid layer of ice on our driveway ever since. Several times I've gone out and hacked away at it with a metal shovel to try breaking it up. Every time it does start to break up, I clear it off and discover there's still a layer of ice underneath. What a pain! It's been 2 and half weeks since that storm, and I've only managed to clear half the driveway. The weather hasn't warmed up enough to melt it, and doesn't look like it will for the foreseeable future.

Winter Measurements

Speaking of snow, I've been dutifully tracking daily precipitation throughout the winter for CoCoRaHS (See this post for a refresher). Last winter I got discouraged at how much work it was to track snow measurements, so I stopped after a while. Here are all the things they want tracked:

• The melted amount of new snow that fell in the rain gauge's outer cylinder.
• The depth of new snow on a snow board.
• Using an outer cylinder to extract a core of new snow from the snow board and reporting the melted amount.
• The total depth of snow on the ground.
• Once per week, using an outer cylinder to extract a core of snow from the ground and reporting the melted amount.

That is a crazy amount to measure! They do say you don't have to do all of those things, though. You're a volunteer, so just do what you can. This year I decided to be fully prepared heading into winter. I watched all of their training videos, attended a webinar, and bought the extra supplies they recommend, which include:

• An extra outer cylinder for the rain gauge.
• A "snow stick" -- basically a yard stick that measures to the tenth of an inch.
• A "snow swatter" -- basically a hard plastic fly swatter to help collect core samples.
• A snow board on which to measure new snow. They recommend a large piece of plywood painted white but I went with a white commercial-grade cutting board that some users recommended.

It's still a lot of work, but with those extra supplies (and having to work from home due to the pandemic), I've been able to track measurements every day.

One of the handy things I learned from their training videos is that instead of melting snow to measure the liquid amount, you can get the same value by weighing it. An inch of water weighs 201 grams. By weighing the snow in the cylinder using a kitchen scale, subtracting the weight of the cylinder, and dividing by 201, you get the amount of liquid water in inches. When we got the 2+ inches of snow/rain/sleet on December 30th, I tried first weighing and then melting/measuring the amount in the rain gauge, and I was kind of amazed that it worked! Both techniques came out to 0.73 inches of water.

(A clever tip I picked up from the webinar was to use a permanent marker to write the weight of the empty outer cylinder on the bottom. Since I have 2 outer cylinders now, and they weigh a slightly different amount, that tip has been very handy.)

Tahini-Fig Muffins

Finally, a few weeks ago Wendy tried out a new recipe: Tahini muffins with figs. I thought it sounded really weird, but was willing to give it a try. For the first couple of muffins I ate, my taste buds agreed: they were weird muffins. But they grew on me, and by the end of the batch I thought they were really good. Wendy made another batch this week (with an extra egg to make them less crumbly and with twice as many figs as called for), and they were quite good. Here's a link to the recipe, if you're interested: 

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/08/tahini-muffins-with-figs.html

Wendy said she would consider adding cinnamon if she makes them again.

At one point last week I looked at the weather forecast for the coming days and it showed nothing but clouds. I was disappointed, concerned that I would miss out on seeing the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. However, if there was one thing I learned leading up to the solar eclipse a few years ago, it's that forecasting cloud cover, even just a few days in advance, is very difficult.

Fortunately, on Sunday the clouds cleared out, and Wendy and I got to see the conjunction. I started with binoculars, but after a while got out the telescope and set it up. Both planets, along with Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings, were visible in the same field of view. It was a very cool sight. I took some admittedly terrible pictures with my cell phone; this is the one that turned out best:

Jupiter is the large bright spot on the right; Saturn is on the lower left. If you look closely, you can spot what sure look like five Galilean moons of Jupiter. That's rather surprising since there are only 4 Galilean moons. I suggested to Wendy that perhaps I'd just made a momentous scientific discovery. "McHenry Man Discovers New Moon of Jupiter!" the headlines would read. She wasn't buying it, and neither was I, to be honest. I figured it had to be a background star, but what are the odds a star would line up perfectly with the Galilean moons on one of the nights I look through the telescope?

After I was done looking at the conjunction (I looked at it for a good long while because it was just so darn cool), I went inside and used the free Stellarium program to figure out just what this "fifth moon" was. Here's the view Stellarium showed:

It looked exactly like what I saw. There was no label immediately visible on the object, which was between Callisto and Ganymede, so I knew it wasn't a moon. Clicking the object revealed that it was in fact a background star, going by the name of HIP 99314. So, mystery solved. No scientific discovery for me.

You might also notice that Stellarium shows a couple of Saturn's moons. It's possible that one of them, Titan, was visible in the telescope; I don't remember. I wish now that I'd looked at Stellarium before looking through the telescope. I'll have to remember that for next time.

Technically, Jupiter and Saturn were at their closest on Monday, but that day was totally cloudy here. I would have loved to look at them again, but I'm glad I at least got the opportunity on Sunday.

And with that, it's nearly midnight here. Merry Christmas!

Over the past few years I've been eating popcorn more often. I'm not entirely sure why; I used to think popcorn was boring and never ate it, but now I really enjoy it. I started off with store brand popcorn kernels, but soon discovered a preference for Pop-Secret Jumbo Popping Corn, since it was big and had fewer unpopped kernels.

However, one of the things Wendy got me for my birthday this year was a variety pack of popcorn from Amish Country Popcorn:

Over the next few months I tried all 10 varieties, and it was really surprising how much better some of them were!

Here are the 10 varieties, and the brief description that accompanied each one:

• Mushroom: Pops in a Ball
• Purple: Tender, Less Hulls, More Flavor, Higher in Antioxidants
• Extra Large: Caramel Type
• Red: Fewer Hulls
• Baby White: Extra Small and Tender
• Medium Yellow
• Rainbow: Unique Blend
• Ladyfinger: Smallest of the Hulless
• Blue: Just a Little Sweeter
• Medium White: Hulless

I had no idea there were so many different types, or that hulless popcorn even existed. The first one we tried was Purple, and we could tell from the first bite that it was much better than traditional popcorn. When we tried Mushroom (which really did pop in a ball), it tasted like normal popcorn, which was disappointing now that we knew popcorn could taste so much better!

The Extra Large (Caramel Type) popcorn was another one that tasted like plain popcorn, so Wendy turned it into caramel corn, which was delicious. The opposite of Extra Large was clearly Ladyfinger, which tasted good, but it was so ridiculously tiny it was almost comical. I kind of wish now that I'd taken a picture of Ladyfinger side-by-side with Extra Large.

When I finished the variety pack, I had 3 clear favorites: Red, Purple, and Blue, so I ordered one-pound bags of all three.

That wasn't the only popcorn I've tried recently, though. A few months ago Wendy joined the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, which delivers a selection of heirloom beans every quarter (she'd been on the waiting list for nearly a year, and was super excited when the invitation finally arrived). Her first shipment included a bonus bag of Crimson popcorn. I'm not clear if it's any different than the Red Amish Popcorn, but I was still excited to try it, and I can report that it, too, is delicious.

Meanwhile, we still have an unopened jar of Pop-Secret Jumbo Popping Corn sitting in our cabinet. I don't know when, or even if, we'll use it!

A few years ago a coworker gave me a copy of the documentary movie "I Am Not your Negro", which is about James Baldwin. Although he said it was really good, I didn't watch it at the time. I was afraid of the uncomfortable truths it might make me face.

A few months ago, though, I sat down and watched it. My coworker was right; it was really good! I'd heard of James Baldwin before, but didn't know much about him. He was an author, a speaker, and an activist. The movie included several clips of interviews with Baldwin, and I was amazed at how profound and insightful his comments were. Here's one example:

And another:

Later, I mentioned to the coworker that I finally watched the movie and really enjoyed it. He said he'd just bought, but not yet read, a book about Baldwin called "Begin Again". It's written by Eddie Glaude Jr, a professor at Princeton.

I bought that book, read it, and enjoyed it. The book really drove home a couple of points:

1. The civil rights movement failed. It got a few laws changed, but didn't change the hearts of white America. The elections of Nixon and Reagan were evidence of this, according to both the author and Baldwin.
2. America is a lie. Its heroes, its documents, its myths are a lie. America is not a free country, because white people think they matter more.

After finishing the book, I decided it was time to read Baldwin's writings, instead of just reading about him. I started with "Notes of a Native Son" which is a collection of his essays. Some of them were really good, but a few were specific to 1950's pop culture, which I found less interesting.

By this point I noticed that every so often something Baldwin wrote or said reminded me of Leonard Cohen. It was usually some short, profound statement of truth. They both wrote poetry, so I guess it's not too surprising. For example, the book "Begin Again" got its title from this Baldwin quote:

"Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, then one begins again."

Here's another quote that really stuck with me:

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."

After "Notes of a Native Son" I decided to read some of Baldwin's fiction. I checked out a book from the library collecting 3 of his early novels. The first one was "Go Tell It on the Mountain" which was very good; kind of a tour through the hearts of the main characters (in that way it reminded me of "The Brothers Karamazov").

I'm currently halfway through the 2nd book, "Giovanni's Room", and the 3rd book is "Another Country" which I'm very much looking forward to. I read a review where someone said their book club read it and nearly everyone thought it was one of the best novels they had ever read.

Way back in 2013, while doing research for my Android astronomy app, I came across the blog of AstroBob, written by Bob King, an amateur astronomer. I quickly learned that it's a one-stop shop for all things happening in the night sky, and how to see them. I've been following it ever since.

Last Friday, AstroBob posted about a neat event happening that night. With a large enough telescope, you would be able to see the shadows of 2 of Jupiter's moons cross the face of the planet, and the Great Red Spot would be visible at the same time! That sounded really cool, like a triple feature!

It was totally clear that night, so around 10:45pm, I set up the telescope in the driveway and aimed it at Jupiter. Right on cue, shortly after 11pm, there were 2 shadows visible, along with the Great Red Spot. The shadows belonged to the moons Ganymede and Io. Ganymede's shadow was bigger and quite clear. Io's shadow was much smaller and harder to spot, but as it slowly moved closer to the center it was easier to identify. I could also make out several bands of clouds on Jupiter. Between the Great Red Spot, the cloud bands, and the 2 moon shadows, it was quite a sight!

I tried taking some pictures with my phone's camera, but as you can probably guess, they didn't turn out great. Still, you can easily see some of Jupiter's moons:

I also looked at Saturn through the scope and could easily see its rings. The camera couldn't, of course, but you can kind of tell from the shape that rings were there.

I was outside for a full hour watching the show. I got a number of mosquito bites, but, for once, it wasn't the mosquitoes that drove me inside, it was the skunk smell! I heard a rustling in the bushes behind me at one point, but didn't see anything. A bit later, the smell was unmistakable and only getting stronger, so I called it a night, packed up, and went inside.

A couple of weeks ago was a birthday/furlough/vacation extravaganza. I was on furlough for the week, which happened to coincide with my birthday, so Wendy used vacation time to take the week off of work. I opened presents, we had a delicious birthday carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and we also explored some hiking and biking trails we'd never been to before.

Somme Woods

We started off by visiting the hiking trails at Somme Woods in Northbrook. Unfortunately, they were a big disappointment. The trail was very narrow, with weeds as tall as me on both sides. Although the woods were pretty, I did not enjoy walking through giant weeds. After a quarter of a mile we gave up.

All was not lost, though. We left Somme Woods and drove to a nearby city park (the kind with playgrounds and freshly mowed grass and no man-sized weeds) where we had a nice picnic lunch. Then we went across the street and got ice cream from Graeter's, which is an ice cream chain we first visited in Cincinnati last year on our trip to the Serpent Mound (see this post).

Sun Lake Forest Preserve

The next day we went on a hike at the Sun Lake Forest Preserve in Lake County. This trail was very wide, much more my style:

We went on a 2.5 mile hike, stopping at one point to take a picture of Sun Lake way off in the distance.

The only drawback to this hike was the heat. We didn't realize how hot it was when we started, and were both beginning to melt by the end. Now that I think about it, there really weren't that many trees for a so-called forest preserve. It would have been nice to have a bit more shade on this hike.

Long Prairie Trail

The next day we went for a bike ride on the Long Prairie Trail, and it was fantastic. The trail was mostly flat and the weather was perfect (sunny, in the 70s, with a cool breeze). We rode through a couple of small towns, past a lot of cornfields, and through numerous "tree tunnels" that provided lots of shade. The trail is 15 miles long, but after 7 miles we decided to take a short break and turn around, so we rode 14 miles round trip. That's our longest ride of the year.

Here's the start of the trail:

One of many tree tunnels:

One of many cornfields:

I really liked how the trail had little rest stops off the main trail, so you could take a break without being in the way of other bikers.

We saw several of these "Farm Crossing" signs. I guess it's where tractors and other farm equipment can cross over the trail.

Even though it's a 45-minute drive to get to the trail, this is easily one of my new favorites. I hope to go back there sometime soon and hopefully one day ride all 15 miles of it.

In my recent blog post about Turtles, I mentioned an article I read about the Loch Ness monster. That article had several references to the blog lochnessmystery.blogspot.com, which I hadn't heard of, so I started following it via my RSS reader.

Saturday afternoon I read the latest post from the blog, about an unidentified object in a recent photo of Loch Ness, which most people thought looked suspiciously like the head of a snorkeler. Shortly after reading that I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. That article must have put me in a Loch-Ness frame of mind, because as I walked along the large pond near our house, I saw a long thin neck and head of a bird sticking out of the water, and I thought "That's funny, that looks almost exactly like a small Loch Ness monster." I also though it was unusual, because the birds we usually see on the pond (ducks, geese, herons, swans, egrets) always float on the water, never underneath.

The neck and head then disappeared underwater. With my curiosity piqued, I pulled my phone out and started recording a video, waiting for the bird to reappear. About 15 seconds later the head and neck reappeared, and eventually the bird's body surfaced and it flew away.

After I got home, I asked Wendy, who has become the resident bird expert in our household, thanks to the 2 bird identification apps she installed on her phone, what kind of bird it might have been. She plugged in the facts I reported into one of the apps, and said "It was probably a double-crested cormorant." After looking up more information online, that sounds right.

First, here's a close-up of the head and neck as it reappeared:

And of the bird as it flew away (it stayed just above the water as it flew):

When I looked up more information about cormorants, one of the first things I read was from this article:

They can dive up to 25 feet deep in pursuit of prey or cruise just below the surface with only their long necks and heads above the water — giving the appearance of a periscope or a cross between snake and bird.

That describes exactly what I saw! The article also mentions that cormorants nearly went extinct due to "pesticides and persecution": because they eat fish, cormorants were viewed as pests by commercial fishermen and fish hatcheries. In 1974, only 12 cormorant nests existed in Illinois, all in 2 trees along the Mississippi River. But, after the pesticides were banned, they've become common again in the state. By 2018, there were 40,000 nesting pairs in the Great Lakes area. That's quite a comeback!

I also read this article ("Cool Cormorants") that had some neat facts:

• Cormorant feathers are not waterproof. Instead, they get waterlogged, which helps them sink and dive better.
• After exiting the water, they sit in the sun with their wings spread open, to help dry their feathers.
• Their short wings are great for use as rudders under the water, but it comes with a price: "cormorants have the highest energy cost of any flying bird".
• After eating they regurgitate pellets containing fish bones and other indigestible parts.

This evening, Wendy and I went for a bike ride around the neighborhood. At one point, we passed by the pond and there happened to be a cormorant sitting in plain sight on the shore:

It seemed fairly oblivious to what was going on. An SUV stopped briefly so the driver could get a good look at it. A couple out for a walk stopped to watch it, and then Wendy and I parked our bikes next to it so I could take the picture. The cormorant seemed completely unconcerned about all the attention. I then remembered that as I was walking around Saturday afternoon, I saw the dead body of a dark-colored bird floating along the shore. Now I wonder if it could have been this cormorant's mate.

Finally, I'm not the only one to think that cormorants look like a small Loch Ness monster. A quick Google search turned up several other articles making the same observation, including this one from, funnily enough, The Oklahoman.

Last week I read this article from Scientific American, which talks about the 3 types of neutrinos. Bizarrely, as a neutrino particle flies through space it actually oscillates between all 3 types. If you could fly along with it, you would see the particle shifting between each one. Even more bizarre is that scientists now think there's a 4th type of neutrino that may be a link to dark matter, and if you were were flying along, you would see the neutrino disappear as it shifted into this new type, then reappear some time and distance later when it shifted back. And, ranking as the most bizarre of all (the taking of the bizarreness cake!), all of this is eerily similar to a story Alvin Schwartz told in An Unlikely Prophet, which I didn't have room to share in my original blog post about the book.

The story is how something called laminar flow (a concept from fluid dynamics) caused the FBI to censor Superman.

In the early 1940s, Alvin Schwartz was writing the Superman comic strip for daily newspapers. He'd created a boring, "by-the-book" physics professor who refused to believe Superman could fly faster than the speed of light because it violated Einstein's theories of relativity. Schwartz wanted Superman to prove the professor wrong, but he couldn't think how to do it. He was stuck. 

One weekend, while visiting his wife's family in Canada, he turned on the TV to pass the time. A BBC program happened to be on, which showed an experiment demonstrating laminar flow. I couldn't find an online video of exactly what he saw, but I did find one that was very close. I've embedded the video below, and I recommend watching it now. It's only 2 minutes long, and it is wild. Here it is (and here's a direct link):

In the experiment Schwartz watched on TV, there was a beaker filled with a liquid (glycerine), with 1 drop of black ink on the surface. As the beaker was stirred the drop spread out into a long thin circle, and then disappeared completely. When stirring was reversed, the long thin circle reappeared, and formed back into the original drop of ink.

Watching that experiment caused Schwartz to have a mystical experience. He understood that "the universe was always a single whole" and "that nothing was ever lost". He says:

In other words, a particle could disappear into the whole and then reemerge a moment or possibly even centuries later.

(That sounds strangely similar to the neutrino article!)

The "universal totality" Schwartz experienced also gave him a sense that time does not exist. And if there's no time, the speed of light is no longer a barrier. And that gave him an idea on how to solve his Superman story. He had Superman stand inside a particle accelerator (called cyclotrons back then). When the professor saw that Superman was unharmed by the smashing of atoms, he was finally convinced that Superman existed beyond the laws of physics.

But there was one other thing Schwartz intuited from his mystical experience:

I had also seen something else in that timeless and universal all into which I had plunged as I watched that [BBC] experiment. I had seen, coming out of that cyclotron, an explosion greater than anyone had ever seen before on earth.

With the story wrapped up, Schwartz sent it to the editor and that was that. He didn't bother reading the comic strip as it was printed in the paper. But, years later, he read an article in the New York Post called "Superman Had It First". He learned that the FBI had censored the end of his Superman story before it was printed, because the Manhattan Project was still "the world's most carefully guarded secret" at the time! The FBI even interviewed Jerry Siegel, one of Superman's creators, but neither he nor the publisher wanted it known that Superman was being ghost written, so they never told the FBI who the real author was. And then they never bothered telling the author that the FBI censored his story!

I tried finding an online copy of that New York Post article, but wasn't able to. I did find this clipping, though, from an unknown newspaper. It claims that instead of printing Schwartz's ending, the publisher had Superman step out of the cyclotron, say he "never felt better", and then go to a baseball game where he played all 9 positions.

So far this year I had only ridden my bike around the neighborhood. But this extended-holiday weekend I made two trips to a bike trail. Thursday I went for a 6.34 mile solo ride on the Prairie Trail, and Saturday Wendy and I went for a 7.11 mile ride on a different section of the same trail.

Both days were hot and sunny, but I/we avoided the worst of the heat by going in the mid-morning. On the Thursday ride, there was a tree company trimming trees along the trail, so I had to navigate around trucks and men in hard hats grinding up branches. There were no such obstacles on our Saturday ride, but there were a lot of other people out riding and it seemed like everyone was in a friendly, cheerful mood.

Here are some photos from both rides:

Season Totals:

• Distance = 54.07 miles
• Total Time = 5 hours 56 minutes.

Since the middle of March, I've been tracking the daily COVID-19 statistics for Illinois in a spreadsheet. When I started doing this, I would watch Dr. Ngozi Ezike (the head of the Illinois Department of Public Health) announce the numbers for the previous day at the governor's daily press conference. Over time, those daily press conferences ended, but the numbers are still posted online each afternoon. So each day I get those numbers and plug them into the Google spreadsheet I created, and a bunch of formulas churn out all the data points I'm interested in.

My main reason for doing this is so I can create the charts I want to see. Now that I've got about 3 and a half months worth of data, I thought I'd share those charts.

I started out by charting the number of positive cases each day:

It's an interesting chart, but one day Dr. Ezike said that when you see a day or two of decreases, you can't assume it's a trend. To detect trends, you really need to look at weekly data. So I made a chart summarizing the data by each week. I have to confess it took me a really long time to figure out how to make the chart and get the axes labeled correctly. So here are the positive cases in Illinois summarized by week:

As you can see, we reached a peak the first week of May, and its been steadily declining until this week, which saw a small increase (up 17% from last week).

Here's the weekly data for COVID-19 deaths in Illinois:

It also peaked the first week in May.

Lately I've been reading articles about other states having a record high number of positive tests. What I really want to know when I read those stories is what is the percentage of positive tests in those states and is it changing? I recently created this chart to see what that looks like for Illinois:

Outside of one 47% outlier, Illinois peaked in the low to mid 20% positive range. For the past couple of weeks, Illinois has been steady at 2-3% of tests being positive.

At one point, Illinois saw a jump in the number of positive tests, which caused some concern among the public. The governor and Dr. Ezike assured everyone that it was okay, because the percent of positive tests was staying the same. The high number of positives was just because we ramped up the number of tests being performed. Last I heard, there were 3 labs in the state, one in north, one in the central, and one in the south, which were running tests 24/7. Here's a chart I made just now, looking at the number of tests performed in Illinois:

For the most part, Illinois has done 20-30,000 tests per day, but the past 3 days have all been over 30,000.

Finally, I've been keeping track of the numbers for McHenry County. Here are the weekly totals for positives and deaths.

Both peaked the first week in May, and this week saw a sizable 35% increase in positive cases.

It will be interesting to see how all of these numbers change in the future.