Hiding the thirteenth floor by renumbering everything above 12 always seemed like a silly superstition…but then aren’t they all when you really think about them?
Pizza Place Preps for Pi Day
The local Round Table Pizza is advertising using Pi Day (3.14). I love that this has gone from being a geeky meme shared around Facebook to something you can see out in the real world.
Update: We made our own pi.
Halo achievement unlocked: Spotted a parhelic circle.
Sun halo fragments, clockwise from upper left:
- A sundog to the left of the sun.
- Part of a 22° circular halo to the right.
- Part of a parhelic circle (I think) in the opposite direction.
I spotted these just walking to lunch today, shortly after noon (well, DST noon). I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first with the parhelic circle. It was clearly too smooth and regular to be part of the clouds surrounding it, but I’d never actually seen one before. Sundogs and 22-degree halos are a lot more common, even in the Los Angeles area.
After looking around for other halos, spotting the sundog and the 22°, and checking the height of both the sun and the mystery arc, I realized it was probably part of the parhelic circle, which when complete is a white circle running around the entire sky at the same altitude as the sun.
It wasn’t clear to the eye, but in the (slightly contrast-enhanced) photo of the sundog, it looks like the circle extends through it…which suggests to me that maybe I have seen it before. I’ve seen what I thought were elongated sundogs, but maybe they were sundogs with small fragments of this halo.
Halos like these are caused by reflections of sunlight inside ice crystals, sometimes near the ground and sometimes, as in this case, up in the sky. Different shapes, sizes and arrangements of crystals create different paths to the eye, which make different halos.
No Pie For You!
Sure, it’s been done before, but this is the first I’d seen this meme in the wild.
For the record, I didn’t have any pie, but I did have an awesome Belgian waffle drenched in blackberries.
Fallen Tree
A tree in a city park, knocked down during a heavy storm.
What struck me most about the view from this side was the patch of sod hanging off of the exposed roots.
You can see where the first tree knocked over another tree.
Yes, one tree fell on another and knocked it down too. Or maybe one fell and then the other fell on top of it – it’s hard to tell, since we weren’t there at the time.
Originally posted on a mix of Instagram and Flickr.
Venus and Mars are all right tonight
My tripod, on the other hand, seems not to have been as steady as I thought. Or I jostled it a tiny bit, enough to register on Venus but not the much dimmer satellite dish.
Speaking of dimmer, though….wow, nothing like a conjunction to remind you just how much brighter Venus is than, well anything else in the night sky except the moon.
Not Going to Comic-Con This Year (But I Feel Fine)
It’s been getting more and more difficult each year to get tickets (not to mention hotel rooms) for Comic-Con International, and each of the last few years I’ve been wondering if this one might be the year I’d be shut out. The current system is a lottery: Everyone who wants tickets signs into a “waiting room” website before the sale starts, and the system randomly selects batches of people to let into the ticketing system, slowly enough that it won’t crash under the load, until all the tickets are sold out.
It took about an hour to sell out on Saturday.
Despite teaming up — you can buy tickets for yourself and up to two other people, so you can make arrangements among a group of three that whoever gets in first will buy tickets for the others — we watched as first Preview Night, then Saturday, then Friday, then Thursday, and finally Sunday each sold out. The official SDCC Twitter account was more timely with that information than the waiting room, which refreshed its message every 2 minutes, but insisted that Thursday was “very low” for at least one refresh after they reported the sellout on Twitter.
It’s going to be the first year since 1990 that I haven’t been to San Diego for Comic-Con.
Oddly, I’m only mildly disappointed.
- I was half-expecting it.
- WonderCon and Long Beach Comic-Con are both great conventions in the area (WonderCon 2014 & LBCC 2014 writeups) that are a lot easier to get into (and less crazy to attend). The kiddo might enjoy Comikaze — he’ll be almost five by then. (Wow!)
- I’ve been lucky the last few years, so I guess now it’s someone else’s turn.
- If we really want that SDCC experience, there’s the possibility of taking the train down to San Diego on Saturday to look at the stuff outside that doesn’t require a ticket. The kiddo will like the train ride too, I suspect.
Then again, the last two times I’ve gone to San Diego, I’ve gotten a first-hand look at the inside of an emergency room. Maybe it’s just as well that I don’t try for three in a row.