mortiz080

It's been quite a year...  I made it back to Bonaire this year, looking for more parrotfish, and more Challenges.  The tropics will return to SRS in the months ahead!  When I look back over the past twelve months of Challenges, answers, comments, and discussion, I see a rich back-and-forth between readers (some of whom are active commenters), me, and the world at large.   I mean, look at the range of topics we've investigated!  We've talked about everything from why an island in Fiji seems to be missing ( January 3, 2018 ) to deep investigations about why a piece of real estate in San Francisco seems to be unusually shaped ( February 28 ), to how large seeds are dispersed ( June 2 ), and why a stream in Austria seems to flow uphill ( July 25 ).  These are all amazingly curious observations about the world; things we notice that drive our curiosity and our research.  What I find so much fun about these Challenges (and frankly, the discussions that ...

There's a lot of construction going on...  ... and so there are a lot of cranes in the local Google landscape, including a bunch of very tall, very large, and very odd ones.     So I was surprised when I saw tall poles on the construction site with what looks like wheels on the top.   The obvious question: "What are these things?"   Here's the original picture, and a closeup of what look like big bicycle wheels at the top of several of the vertical posts.    This is my original photo, taken on a run past a large Google construction site. Here's a better, closer-up picture that I took yesterday...    Does this help?   How about these pictures?  In this one, you can see the wire ropes going up into the wheel--so we now know it seems to be something more like a reel (or spool).   1.  What are these mysterious wheeled poles called?  Why are there wheels on top?  What do they do?  ...

More photos!  I went over to the construction site and took a new photo today.  It's below.  If you click on the image, you can download the original (with all of the EXIF metadata).   This wasn't ideal lighting conditions for photography, but I did what I could.   I also took my binoculars so I could get a close-up look, and found that the wheels actually have multiple loops of cable wrapped around them.  The yellow boxes (one per wheel) seem to be motors that drive the wheels (but I'm guessing about that).   In this closeup (from another pic), you can see that the wheels are both "tipped inward" towards each other at about a 45 degree angle.  You can also see the cables, though it's not completely clear how the cables run from below other than they wrap a bit onto the wheel in multiple loops.    I'll try to get better photos later.. Perhaps tomorrow I'll remember my telephoto lens.  We'll crack this Challenge yet!...

My father used to work for a crane and shipping company...  ... and so I thought I knew a thing or two about cranes.  I grew up around them, and as a young man, I worked for several summers as an "yard hand" (that is, the guy who helped string the wire ropes around things that the crane operator would pick up--so I worked with a lot of cranes.)   But I was surprised when I went past a nearby construction site and saw number of cranes (or things that look like cranes)--with wheels  on the top!   The obvious question is "What are these things?"   Here's the original picture, and a closeup of what look like big bicycle wheels at the top of several of the vertical posts.    This is my original photo, taken on a run past a large Google construction site. Closeup of the wheeled things. (I'll try to get a better picture tomorrow, but this will have to do at the moment.)   The "wheeled poles" seem to have cables running down ...

Gratefully, the wildfires are out …  … It's been a wild summer of fire in California.   As you recall from the Challenge of November 14, 2018  I posed the SRS Challenge "How many wildfires have there been in California over the past 20 years?"    Regular Reader Ramón asked this question, and it turned out to be a really relevant question. 1. How has the number of wildfires changed over the years in California?  Where there more (or fewer) in the past than is taking place now?   I suspected that the only way to answer this is to find an authoritative data base of California wildfires.  I started my research with:       [ database California wildfires ]  which gave me this SERP:  The first hit is the "statistics and events" data from CDFData.Fire.ca.gov  Sure enough--that's pretty authoritative.   If you visit that page, you'll learn that the statewide fire organization is CALFIRE.  Th...

You'd think that searching to solve a problem would be second nature to me by now.   And yet, I didn't do a search last week that I really  should have done.   Last Monday the front passenger window on my car went down, and got stuck in the down position.  Darn it. This is on my Subaru Outback, a nice car, but nothing really special--it's not a high-end car with lots of special gizmos and the like.  I use it to carry my gear around and keep me out of the rain.  The switch looks like this.  Push down to roll the window down, pull up to make it come up.  Except that pulling-up thing wasn't doing anything.   Speaking of which, did I mention it was raining?  Water was coming in through the open window, and I could NOT get it to come up.  This is a hassle.   Here's the interesting detail:  Normally, when I'm sitting in the driver's seat, I can use the switch on the driver's side door to open/close the passen...