Game

Monday, July 20, 2009

Eastern Washington Smoke

Today I flew to Cape Cod for a meeting on moving weather research to operations. I ALWAYS get a window seat. As we crossed the Cascades I was stunned on how murky it looked....there was clearly lots of smoke and it was pushed up against the eastern slopes of the Cascades.

Take a look at this satellite picture from this morning....there is a significant fire in southern BC and the smoke plume is heading south (see red arrow). Can you see the smoke entering eastern Washington?

You will also notice the extensive low clouds along the coast and the tendrils almost reaching the south Sound. Later on during the day the smoke plume was less distinct..the vertical mixing due to surface heating helps diffuse the smoke in the vertical.

There are going to be a lot more fires. In contrast, the people I talked to today here in New England were complaining about their cold, dreary summer.

Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One large step for open source code...

On this day 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. This was quite an achievement for mankind and a key milestone in world history.

To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.

For more information on this project, I recommend looking at the website and the open source project.

Here are a few links to the source code:

As the project evolves, look for syntax highlighting done with a special extension for google-code-prettify.

Image - NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

By Nathaniel Manista, Project Hosting on Google Code

Moon shot

I was alive but I was too young to remember the first moon landing. But as I was growing up, and definitely before I turned 10, there was a sense that more was to come. A moonbase in 1999 depicted on TV seemed plausible. Casual space travel by 2001 seemed almost under-stating what could be done. Even The Economist feared Europe dropping out of having a role contributing to advancement. Yet here we are. People went to the moon and then did not return for 34 odd years and counting. I do not recall that prediction being made even if there were constant voices against the expense of all of this space travel.

This hit home as I showed my 10 year old daughter this terrific website: wechoosethemoon.org. It is tracking in 'real time' the whole moon expedition. At any point in time you can see what was going on exactly 40 years ago.

"What's this?"

"It is showing where the lunar lander is. You see, here it is in orbit around the moon. They are about to land."

"What? There are people up there now? Is that possible?"

"No, it is just showing what happened 40 years ago."

"Oh, yes. That's what I thought. We don't do this anymore."

And there you have it. It is hard to have these conversations and feel that somehow we have failed. The current generation believe what is true, that such space travel is as much as a dream as it was prior to the 1960s. I know that some will say that was all well and good given the cost. But the cost of the entire space program over that time, in today's dollars, was $176 billion. And yes, that, in retrospect was too costly. Not because of the resources it took but because the expense surely had value in knowledge created that would built up and lead to greater things. To not have reinvested on the back of that achievement was to erode the capital value of the initial expense. Almost impossible to conceive at the time, the moon landings were a short-term policy and not a serious commitment to the future. It will leave us and the next generation wondering what could have been.

One of the Greatest Video Game Titles Ever

You know when you see the title of something, and it makes you intensely interested in whatever it is.

I had that experience late last week.

I was doing some research on some Tactical/Strategic Role Playing Games, and I happened to be at the NIS America site (a company that has made most of the games of that type on the PS2) when a particular just released PSP title grabbed my attention.

Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This?

The title sort of reminds me of a movie/documentary starring Marlee Matlin called What the #$*! Do We Know!? , which from what I understand is also one of those strange conceptual pictures that is a documentary wrapped into a narrative film like beaten egg whites into a chiffon (ok, I admit I've been watching too many cooking shows as of late). And it also makes me think back to my third podcast when I played a song called "This Is Where the Robot Escapes His Evil Captor, Finds Raygun, Plots Revenge"

Basically, the goal of this game is you play the villain in a Role Playing-type game, and you must prevent heroes (you know, the lads and lasses you play as in most RPGs) from coming into your lair and taking you to justice. So you have to set up an ecosystem in your dungeon so that your various creatures of evil will survive and get stronger so they can take whatever the heroes who have come to stop your ultimate reign of evil can dish out and finish them off once and for all. And from what I've read, it is supposedly jam packed full of pop culture references and a wicked sense of humor (the latter I've just discovered playing Disgaea over the weekend).

I don't have a PSP, but I think the idea is certainly a winner. It may not be the prettiest game out there, but I can certainly forgive a great game for not being a looker. I did it for Fire Pro Wrestling Returns after all. If it ever gets ported to the Playstation 2, I'll be sure to pick it up.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Sunday Night Video: Yesterday

The original Beatles song is almost completely mournful, and as one of the most covered songs ever, well, it is hard to find someone who brings something completely new to the material. Ray Charles was an artist who could do that.

To me, I notice as it gets bigger, it is almost as if Charles has gained strength after the relationship ended... like after some time, he still has some regrets, but he has learned to live with them, come to some understanding of what has happened, even if it isn't explicitly spelled out and come away from the experience a survivor.

OK, maybe that's just me.

Also, Ray Charles covered Eleanor Rigby, which made it more depressing somehow.

Friday, July 17, 2009

When is the windiest time of the day?

This time of the year there are real differences in wind speed during various times of the day and in virtually all locations it is windiest during the late afternoon. Take a look at the above trace of weather observations at my department at the UW (you can click on it to see a bigger version). Note: times are in GMT/UTC... 00Z is 5 PM, 18Z is 10 AM, etc. Winds are light during the late evening and early morning, then pick up during the morning hours. You will also notice the wind shift...typically southwesterly in the morning and northwesterly during the higher wind period.

How about Hoquiam or Ellensburg over the past two weeks? See the attached graphics. You will see a strong daily (diurnal) variation in wind speed.

So why do winds vary during the day so much? A few reasons. The first is that winds generally increase with height in the atmosphere (since friction or drag is greatest near the rough surface). During the night when the surface cools, the atmosphere is more stable in the vertical (less mixing when cooler, dense air is low down). During the day, the surface warms and the air tends to mix in the vertical, as less dense, heated air rises. More mixing brings the winds down from aloft and thus the winds tend to be stronger.

But there is another reason...local, diurnal circulations like the sea breeze. At night land and water are similar in temperature around here, but during day, and particularly warm days, the land heats and pressure tends to fall over land compared to water. The result are sea breeze circulations that increase winds. On the coast near Hoquiam there is a classic sea breeze across the coast. Over Puget Sound there is the Sound breeze between the water-filled NW interior and central Puget Sound, which is mostly land. For Ellensburg, there is a huge "sea breeze" between the strongly heated eastern side of the state and the cooler west. If you want to learn more about these diurnal circulation, my book has a whole chapter on it.

Talking of weather, today (Saturday) is slightly cooler than Friday since there was more marine air moving in last night. Even more marine air will move into the western interior on Sunday. But temps will remain in the 70s and no precipitation is forecast. We have serious dry conditions, particularly east of the Cascade crest. The threat of major fires is quite real.

Week 10: Pageant of the Transmundane

A woman in New York has apparently taught her dog to respond to written commands. You know, like flash cards. So that little pooch may in fact be smarter than a generation of kindergarten students. I had considered using a tale of a man who fought off an attacking mountain lion with a chainsaw, but I heard Bruce Campbell has already bought the rights to that to make into the most awesome movie ever.

This week's winning entry comes from Peter Griffin's Blog, which is part of the SodaHead collective.

The entry in question reveals a rather startling discovery about a beloved video game from a lot of our misspent youths. I am of course talking about Super Mario Brothers.

Turns out that when Toad was telling us all that the princess was in another castle, well, he was also telling us to do something else.

And since this week's winning entry is Super Mario Brothers related, well, having Mario and Homer interacting seemed like the best image I could provide. The scene that followed was more related to Donkey Kong than his later incarnations, but the thought is the same.

Congratulations to Peter Griffin. I don't know why that seems so strange to say, but it does.

The rules of this little contest: Every week I will be selecting one blog post that I have seen from the vast reaches of the blogosphere to bestow with the Homer Simpson Transmundanity Award for being one of the freakiest(in a funny way) things I've seen or read during a 7 day period. It doesn't necessarily have to have been written during the week, I just had to have encountered it. That means that if you find something interesting and repost it like a movie or whatever, if I saw it at your blog first, you get the prize. Of course, creating your own content is also a very good way to win.

Now, if you see a post that you think is worthy of this illustrious prize, just drop me a line at campybeaver@gmail.com and we'll see if we can't get your suggestion up and award-ready while giving you some credit and a link to your own blog.