Geocaching, Roses, Sparks, and Green Screens!

The Crew and I took another adventure the other day.  First, we went to the Children’s Museum in West Hartford.  The kids had a great time, got to pet a skink, fell in love with turtles, and had to be dragged out of the place after almost 3 hours.  A few pics…

Here is The Crew listening to the Skink demonstration. Crew is in lower part of picture. Hard to keep Little Buddy involved as he was obsessed with a "bunny rabbit" display that was close by.

A terrible picture of Little Buddy playing mad scientist with his own "Jacob's Ladder". I tried to get him to give a maniacal laugh but to no avail.

The Crew in the live weather studio set up warning us of a coming blizzard. The director (Little Buddy) had a bit of trouble keeping out of the shot. Please notice The Actress fully into character while The Analyst is far busier trying to figure out how all this works.

And of course when asked later what the best part of the museum was, I got "Lunch!"...typical.

After the museum we headed over to a local geocache at Elizabeth Park in Hartford.  What a beautiful place.  I had stopped by there one morning back in the winter before ARC class and had made a mental note to come back in the summer.  I was psyched that we had the chance and could do a bit of geocaching in the process.  Apparently the park is the former property of a well to do industrialist and statesman Charles Pond who left the park to the City of Hartford.  It was named after his wife Elizabeth (history of Elizabeth Park).

The centerpiece of a park is a huge rose garden with roses climbing trellises and arbors all around.  On this day it was incredible – you could smell the roses from about 50 yards away.  It was one of those things that every once in awhile makes you wish you lived in (or close to) a city – cities so often have such wonderful public places that you just don’t get in suburbia.  There is something to be said for TND! But I digress…

We scored the geocache, wonderful cache too with a nice story about how it was the spot where the cacher(?) proposed to his wife, etc.  A few pics…

The Crew running into the rose garden. Little Buddy trying to keep up. Beautiful place!

A rose. I forgot to write down what kind!

Running underneath the arbors towards the house in the middle of the garden!

Takin' a break in the middle. Chance to catch breath and for Little Buddy to do his patented "suck thumb and curl hair" move.

Found the cache! Wonderful story inside. Cool hiding spot in a sea of rhododendrons. Avoided all "Muggles" on the way...

 A Bit About Jacob’s Ladder…

It wasn’t until writing this post I ever knew the electrical arc b/w two rod device you always see in campy sci-fi pics was called a “Jacob’s Ladder”.  Now this isn’t to be confused with the Biblical Jacob’s Ladder from the book of Genesis where Jacob sees a vision of angels going up and down stairs to heaven and foretelling the expansion of the Jewish tribe.  Nor should it be confused with the most excellent Huey Lewis song.  Nor should it be confused with another rather disturbing definition I found online that we won’t talk about in a family friendly blog (jeez the internet is weird sometimes).

Cool time lapse photo of a Jacob's Ladder from Wikipedia

This Jacob’s Ladder is created by the electrical current run through two rods that are close together at the base and slowly diverge as the rise.  Essentially, the two rods hold a voltage difference that exceeds the “breakdown voltage” of the air between them (for air around 30kV/cm).  The atoms in the air between the rods ionize (the voltage difference provides enough energy for electrons to “break free” and move between the molecules in air to create ions), their electrical resistance drops accordingly and they for a moment become an electrical conductor…a wire made out of air if you will.  This creates heat, which causes the air to rise and the arc travels up between the two rods until the separation is too great to maintain this ionization.

It is the same way in which lightening works, just instead of the voltage differential occurring between the ground and a storm cloud, it is between the two rods.

It is worth noting too that Jacob’s Ladder indoors can actually pose some health risks, as the ionization of the air creates free radicals which can be damaging to the mucous membranes of folks nearby.  Little Buddy’s was safely in a glass case.

A Bit About Green Screens…

So in the museum The Crew got to play weatherman in a “studio” provided by NBC 30.  They got to stand in front of a green screen and watch themselves give a weather report on the monitors.  They thought it was great fun.  As I said The Actress loved being on TV…The Analyst though was more curious about how it all worked though.  I tried to give a “I’m a dad – I know everything” kind of answer, but I really didn’t know.  So I looked it up…

The “green screen”, or by the technical term Chromakey is accomplished by the process of filming a subject in front of a specific color (green or blue – usually chosen because they are far from the dominant colors for skin tone and the camera is very sensitive to them) and then replacing that specific color with the image or video you want.  In digital television, it is as simple as at each pixel point, if the color on the screen matches the specific color designated, that point is replaced with the appropriate point for the image you want to display instead.  Very cool!

A few fun facts learned along the way…

• Red is the dominant color in skin tone.  I wonder if someone who is sick or “green with envy” disappears in front of a green screen – haha!
• When the subject material is green dominant (e.g. plants, etc.), they use a blue screen instead of green.
• The most important factor is the spectrum (ROYGBIV) b/w the subject and the key color.  Clothes for weather folks are carefully chosen accordingly.
• You can find all kinds of fun stuff about Chroma Key here.

‘Til Later,

Backyard Biologist

Fun Facts Fridays – Hurricanes!

Another tradition I would like to start with this blog is on occasional Fridays listing 10 (and only 10) fun facts (fun as defined by me) about anything that pops into my head that seems interesting at the moment.  Since we just survived Hurricane Irene here in the northeast, it seemed apropos to start there.  So…hurricanes…

Hurricane Isabel

10 Fun Facts:

1. The cold water off the western coast prevents hurricanes from surviving there.  Hurricanes get their moisture by the evaporation of warm waters.
2. They are “hurricanes” in the Atlantic, “typhoons” in the western Pacific, and “cyclones” in the Indian Ocean.  They are all names for the exact same type of storm.
3. The Earth’s coriolis effect causes hurricane’s spin and movement towards the poles.
4. The deadliest hurricane ever was the 1970 Bhola Cyclone that slammed into Bangladesh and killed around 500,000 people!
5. The largest hurricane ever recorded was Hurricane Carla that struck Texas in 1961.
6. The general mechanics of a hurricane are as such:
• Warm water (at least 78°) evaporates off the ocean, creating a relative vacuum that draws in more air.  The warm moist air condenses to form clouds/rain which releases heat that warms the cool air above, which rises creating room for more air to get sucked in, etc.  It is a positive feedback cycle.
• Converging surface winds help push the warm air up even faster, and strong upper atmosphere winds blow the risen air out away from the center.  This further perpetuates the cycle to create a significant low pressure zone that begins to rotate (coriolis effect) around an “eye”.
• As air rushes in from the area of relatively higher pressure into this area of extreme low pressure, wind speed increases significantly…alas you have a hurricane.
7. The World Meteorological Organization keeps a 6 lists of storm names (each list has 21 names) that they cycle (no pun intended) through every 6 years.  Whopper storms have their names retired so they are not used again.
8. Florida wins the prize for the state where the most hurricanes have landed (110 total; 35 major ones of Cat. 3-5)
9. There is a long list of retired hurricane names (NOAA Retired Hurricane Names)
10. The word “hurricane” comes from the Carib tribes of the West Indies who called these storms “huracan” after one of their gods.  Spanish colonists changed the name to hurricane.

Here is a good explanation on how hurricanes work…