So the last three days have been pretty much spent doing nothing. Watched some DVD's, made it to the grocery store, played Carcassonne with Kate. We had a wonderful Christmas morning and day and have finally had some good relaxation time.
I hope everyone else had a wonderful and relaxing time as well as we gear up for New Years. Fireworks and Thai food here! Oh yeah, we can once again see the Sun from our window!
It's a little piece from the Associated Press that strangely, does not go under the same title. In fact every other publication that used this article will be found with the title:
My main beef is that Fox News, under the guise of being 'fair and balanced' finds it acceptable to change an article title (that they did not write) to use more inflammatory language that suits it's own agenda. Well, maybe more angering is the use of the term 'anchor baby', which is pretty derogatory in it's own right, to describe what is the 14th amendment of the Constitution ratified in 1868. This amendment defines citizenship and personally I would rather not have Republican's rooting around and changing things in it.
It's additionally amusing because the claim is that the 'anchor baby' makes it so the parents can stay in the country. This is wrong. The child must be 21 years old before the parents can apply for a visa. Enforcement of the current laws in place is really all that is needed; we don't need to go changing the Constitution that Republicans, and Fox News claim is under attack by democrats (If you click this link, also take a look at the URL. It is pretty funny all on its own). Who does the Constitution need protection from?
The Tanana Valley and Denali just after the Solstice sunset. This was our shortest day of the year at 3 hours 41 minutes 22 seconds. Today will be 9 seconds longer, and in a about three weeks we'll be gaining 6 minutes a day.
My schoolwork is finally all submitted and the semester is officially over. Kate's parents have been here for about a week and are heading home tonight. It's been a busy week. We had a lot of good food and spent a lot of time driving around the interior looking for pretty vistas and wildlife. Unfortunately, we saw no moose. How, how can anyone be in Alaska for a week and not see a moose? Kate and I saw three, two after dropping her parents off, and one going to pick them up. Ridiculous.
We did see a wolf on the Salcha river that had a fresh kill. It was really cool. Sorry, no pictures. We also saw a lot of ice; first at Christmas on Ice in North Pole and then in the year-round ice museum at Chena Hot Springs.
Dave, Sandi and Kate in North Pole at the Christmas on Ice carving extravaganza. It was a little uncomfortable it was so cold. But, we had fun anyway.
Christmas shopping happened all over the city. Dave and I drove up to Murphy Dome, where it was 7 degrees F above zero (it hasn't been above zero in Fairbanks in 18 days), but the wind was blowing very hard, so it wasn't really noticeable.
Alaska Range viewed from Murphy Dome. All pictures are in flickr.
Since I won't be posting much again until the semester is over, I thought it would be nice to post some photos daily on my flickr account. Just random stuff that goes on and that we see while out and about.
Go to December and Friends Here!
Otis will snuggle! No amount of Sudoku can stop the cat.
We finally got around to decorating the tree today. Looks good.
So, even though it's pretty dark in Fairbanks right now (sunrise to sunset for December 7th: 4h 12m 30s), because of the shallow angle that the Sun sets we get a lot of twilight. And not the sparkly vampire kind, the good kind where you get pretty views like this one:
This was taken at 9:27 am, a little over 1 hour before sunrise. Color actually started to appear and the mountains took shape at about 8:30 am.
And no, I won't stop taking pictures of the same thing until I have a full years worth of them.
Venus has been really bright, and is just a little out of the frame here. Soon it will be a little closer to the horizon near sunrise and hopefully will make for some good photos if the weather stays clear.
Just so you know, I probably won't post much in the next couple of weeks or so. Next week is finals week, and there's a lot of work and grading to wrap up. Check back soon though!
Here is a fantastic presentation by John Abraham on the fallacies of Christopher Monckton's attempts at debunking global warming with intent on changing public policy on climate change research. Monckton is not a scientist, but he still gets to take on the role of a climate change "policy-maker" in front of congress with the same misconstrued data that Abraham debunks. Abraham's argument is very well presented and very well cited. It's a little long (73 min. 36 sec.), but I highly encourage everyone to sit down some time and listen to it here:
Abraham reviews a large chunk of Monckton's statements, extensively criticizes his lack of attributions (which I would take a step further and call plagiarism), and asks where the money comes from that supports climate change denialists (hint: it's oil money).
Fox news pretty frequently put's Monckton on a pedestal, which creates a scary, resonant phenomena that spreads (almost maliciously) misuse and abuse of science and public policy.
This time last week it was in the mid-thirties and raining. This morning it was thirty below zero. That's almost a 70 degree drop in temperature in a week!
Around 1:00 pm looking over the Tanana Valley to the Alaska Range.
I brought my camera to work today and got a few pictures of the sunrise. It now rises over the Alaska Range, and there was just enough ice in the air to create some parhelia, or sundogs, and some pretty powerful light pillars. The color was really nice through the fog.
After walking around a bit I had a good build-up of ice on my moustache and beard, and a little frostbite on my thumb. At one point my cheek stuck to the camera.
At sunset there was a superior mirage of the Alaska Range. This happens in times of temperature inversion, which is fairly frequent during winter in the interior of Alaska. This just means that warm air sits on top of the colder air in the valley. For a short time many of the mountains appeared to be inverted above the actual mountain range. Because the density of the air changes so rapidly, light from the top of the mountains is bent much more than light from the bottom giving the illusion of sort of a mountain 'forest'. Denali was looming over itself!
Superior mirage over the Alaska Range, with Denali in the center right. Click to enlarge.
I really can't believe how many atmospheric optic effects occur here. It's really, really cool.
Need to waste some time sitting out the most disgusting weather on the planet, otherwise known as 'just warm enough to not snow'?
(1) If you're wondering if the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world yet, you can always check at this website (I provide you no link, it is more gratifying to type it. Don't cheat and copy and paste!):
(3) and XKCD (really my favorite). There is a disclaimer here: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."
I worry that Kate and I brought some New England weather with us to Alaska. Unfortunately, New England weather does not mix very well with sub-zero Alaska roads. We're in for the day today, which is good. I need the time to catch up on some homework.
I've asked around, and searched online and on few journals, but I'm not sure why salt isn't used in the interior of Alaska. I'm not at all proposing to use it since it's terrible for cars and can cause environmental damage in sensitive areas.
I'm just curious if it is a permafrost sensitivity issue, or just getting salt to the interior issue. I think permafrost is neat, and I am glad that salt is not used here, despite my really not liking driving to work today.
Any links or articles would be greatly appreciated!
We knew when we moved here that there were no school closures due to snow (kids still have outdoor recess until it is -20 F), but this is ridiculous. They finally moved to call off school once students were already there, and I just received notice now at 9:30 am that classes are to be canceled at the university.
When we woke up this morning there was an alert on the radio from the Alaska State Troopers not to travel anywhere unless it is absolutely essential.
We drove to work today between 5 and 15 mph most of the way (50 mph zone) and at times it felt too fast. At 5 miles per hour it was difficult to control the car downhill. Sidewalks and roads are a kind of ice that I have never seen before on roadways. It is smoother than any ice rink ice I have seen and it covers every inch of roadway.
It is supposed to continue raining, freezing rain, and 'ice pellets' for the next two days. It is over 20 degrees above average, and has been for a couple of days now. Then Thursday it will drop back down to 10 below. I wonder what happens to this ice then? I think it becomes super ice.
Sorry, I'm grumpy about this. When there are multiple, multi-vehicle accidents all over town, the city buses shut down early, there are warnings from the DOT and State Troopers and the ARMY base shuts down, school should probably be called off.
Here is a pretty picture I took of the full moon last night.
It's been a long week, so now I'm just sitting around listening to music in our little cabin.
I only get to see our home in the light of day on the weekends. The days are still getting shorter by about 6 minutes every day, but the rate of change is starting to slow as we approach solstice. The dark doesn't really bother me at all, but it is difficult to wake up in the morning. I think my body thinks it is supposed to hibernate now. To combat this effect I started working out and climbing again and I think that is helping. Metabolism decreases when faced with darkness like this so it's really important to stay active. Kate and I are going skiing tomorrow. We also want to buy a sled, there are many good sledding hills at UAF.
Oh, it's snowing again. There is no wind in Fairbanks so the snow just sits on all the branches when it falls and the trees hold as much as they physically can. Then the ice fog comes in and seals it in, so it's not going anywhere.
Here I am with Manbharat outside the Reichardt Building posing in front of two fantastic sun dog/pillar rainbows. I've never seen any as extensive as this. The optical effects here in Fairbanks are pretty unreal.
We also get huge light pillars 10's of feet into the sky from car headlights. You can see cars long before they come around the corner because you can see the beams from their headlights extending above the trees. Next time I get the chance, I'll try to photograph these. Here is a photo pulled off of the astronomy picture of the day website (photo by Walter Tape; Fairbanks, AK):
. . . 6, . . .
It's a countdown alright, just like New Years except we're not counting down time, but degrees fahrenheit.
This is kind of exciting. It's about to be 30 degrees colder than the coldest day we've had yet. It seems like every few hours the temperature forecast gets lower. Now, the high tomorrow will be -7 while the low is somewhere between -25 and -35. Woo, woo. Then we're supposed to get more snow on Wednesday and Thursday.
Tuesday's forecast looks grim. I'm pretty sure it's just a reality check to let us know that it is in fact winter in the interior of Alaska. Recently our lows have been around 10 [deg] F at night while the highs reach up into the 20's.
That's about 10 [deg] F above average. It has actually felt pretty comfortable outside.
The forecast for Tuesday has been dropping for a week now. Currently, there is a predicted high of 5-15 below zero, and a low of 25-35 below. That's a pretty cold mid-November morning.
It's not going to stay. It warms back up by Thursday to temperatures a little closer to (yet still above) average.
It snowed most of the weekend, but the clouds are supposed to clear out tonight. NOAA and spaceweather are forecasting a 50% chance of geomagnetic storms as a series of small coronal mass ejections hit the Earth's magnetic field. The question is, can I withstand the sub-zero temperatures to got out and photograph the aurora?
I took a drive out to Murphy Dome earlier tonight to take some pictures. As I get through cleaning up some of them I will post a lot on flickr. It was a little eerie walking around in the dark by myself on top of the dome. By eerie I mean I'm surprised I wasn't trampled by a moose. Here are a few of my favorites.
The lengths at which the Miller campaign is going to get Murkowski votes thrown out is disgusting. His lawyers should be disbarred at this point. I'll buy into some of the arguments concerning how far to go in deciding what "voter intent" is on a write-in ballot, but they are trying to discredit voter intent itself, spitting in the face of democracy. Joe Miller, you don't get to force your way into office.
This little guy came to our suet feeder tonight for a few minutes. He's a northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus yukonensis). It was a cute little thing with huge eyes. I've never seen one that looked quite like this, and definitely not this close.
Earlier in the day we saw a snowshoe hare, but it was much too fast and camouflaged to get a picture.
Night view of Fairbanks from the top of Murphy Dome.
Kate and I haven't spent a whole lot of time in Fairbanks since getting here. So, we thought it would be a good day to go into town and explore a little bit. It was a really quiet Sunday; no traffic and very few people. It started to snow pretty heavily, which is good because we definitely need it. It has been abnormally warm and dry lately.
Along the Chena River on the north side of town is a little park. There is a milepost sign there with the distance to most of the world's large cities. It's fun to know that we are closer to Paris, Honolulu, and Moscow than we are to New York. Also, the state is really big. Fairbanks is pretty central to the state. Even though we are in the middle, Fairbanks is still 489 miles from Prudhoe Bay on the northern coast.
***Update: I thought something was a little off on this sign since it basically says that Montreal is about 1500 miles from New York, which I know it is not. Turns out that some of the distances are by road, others are the way the Crow flies. New York is actually a little over 3250 miles away, while Moscow is almost 1000 miles further (over the pole). I wonder if the city knows. Well, I guess whoever planned the sign didn't really know what he/she was doing. Honolulu is still closer though.***
There is also a WWII memorial commemorating the pilots that flew one of the most dangerous air routes to the fronts with Germany. American pilots flew across the U.S. and Canada, then Soviet pilots flew from Fairbanks, over the Bering Straight, and across Siberia. That's a haul. Kate brushed of the inscription, a quote of President Roosevelt, “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man; or one party; or one nation. . . . It must be a peace that rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.” I like it.
Kate brushing off the Roosevelt inscription on the Alaska Siberia Memorial.
Oh, and then we went to the grocery store. Guess what . . . it's Alaskan King Crab season. We got a little bit, it was really good. I like it too. Otis also got (more than) his share.
It was a really fun day. I took quite a few pictures, most of which are up on flickr now in a Fairbanks page.
Kate and I went to a hockey game tonight between the UAF Nanooks and the Michigan Wolverines with one of Kate's friends and her family. It was a lot of fun and the Nanooks wiped the floor with Michigan 3-0, ending Michigan's 35 game no shut-out streak.
What's really great is the opening video for the Nanooks. It is a conglomeration of awesomeness. Check it out!
I don't like being subjective. Yet, there is a little non-scientist philosopher living inside of me that occasionally has to speak out. Feel free to disagree.
Grow up America. There are two+ political parties. Both sides have intelligent, patriotic people with good ideas, ideals, and promise. They are there, hiding behind the stupid, loud and obnoxious. Your political parties are not sports teams. You do not need to fight every call the referee makes because it faults your team. This is real life, and it needs to be treated with a certain amount of seriousness, intelligence and respect.
Next time Fox News or CNN does anything that is not news, i.e. goes to read people's tweets (or whatever they are called), or offends any other nationality, race, gender, etc., or reports on Sarah Palin's daughter's relationships, just turn it off. Kill their ratings. Send them e-mails or letters to back-up their claims. Really do something. Maybe then we can be helped before actually falling to Idiocracy. (It's a movie, a frightening one when you witness the world today. Watch it.)
Take time to reflect on your own ideals and try to empathize with those that are different than you. More importantly, don't let your internal filters down when you see or hear 'facts' that are presented today. I don't always agree with Rachel Maddow, but I do agree with this analysis. Thanks to Jason for sharing this with me. If this is not absolutely frightening to you, then you won't listen to anything I said here anyway.
Kate pointed out a website to me, politifact.com that seems to be pretty good from what I have read so far.
Today I voted for the first time in the state of Alaska. Today our brand new car broke something fierce. Today was my first continuous sunrise/sunset.
While Kate was driving me to school something blew in the (front?) of the car. It now squeals and occasionally makes a horrible grinding sound. Luckily we have AAA so it was towed to the dealership for free. Unluckily they did not let us know anything about the car tonight. Kate called, but they had already gone home. Now we are without vehicle. We can take the bus, but this is a lot of time and money that we can't deal with right now.
But, really that's the worst of it. The short days aren't affecting me yet despite the fact that they are already 1.5 hours shorter than the shortest day I have ever experienced in Minnesota. Every day until the 21st of December will be the shortest day of my life. Kind of cool.
The really neat thing is that in the daytime now, the colors are of a Western US sunset for the whole day. Just give me some vitamin D and a little artificial light and I'll stare at this for as long as I can.
The view from our street during an extended sunset looking toward the Alaska Range
The sky starts turning orange and red at about 8:30 in the morning and stays varying shades of those colors until about 6:30 or 7pm. I've seen crazy looking sunsets in Wyoming during wildfire seasons that don't match the entire day here. Alaska is pretty awesome. I guess people don't live here because it's winter more often then not, it's thousands of miles from anything, and gets to be really dark and really cold. I can not emphasize enough how far away it is.
This is roughly the drive we made from NH to Fairbanks in google maps. It was a little over 4500 miles.You can read about the long haul in archived posts. The drive is something everyone should make at some point (although I already shudder thinking of tourists).
I finally had the chance to sleep in after one of the longest and hardest work weeks I have ever had. I think I worked an average of 16 hours a day this week, including the weekend. So I woke up a little after 9 and went outside to photograph the sunrise. It's not all that exciting, I know, but these things last for hours here and they are really very pretty. I have a new set on flickr called "our home" where you can find all the pictures I've taken at (and from) our place.
The view from the side of our house the morning after a nice snowfall.
Our front porch (we still need to buy a snow shovel) with the first sunlight hitting the trees.
I have a lot of new pictures I would like to share, I hope you don't mind. Jason and Alex, fellow grad students, and I drove up to Murphy Dome to try to photograph the aurora. We barely got much of a show, and it only lasted for about 15 minutes, but still managed to take many great photos. When we first arrived, about two hours after sunset, we had a very nice view of Denali as it was sticking up into the clouds. The color in the sky was incredible. The Sun sets at such a low angle, that it stays light out for hours after it dips below the horizon.
Denali after sunset from Murphy Dome.
Jason and Alex at the top of Murphy Dome, about 30 minutes northwest of Fairbanks.
At the top of Murphy Dome is a giant radar tower operated by the Army Air Force. There was once an Air Force Base in the 50's and multiple radars for use with the nike missile system. At night it makes a nice photo subject, especially when it's inside a 22 degree halo from the full moon. The back-side is almost totally open, and it's apparently a little over 2900 vertical feet. There used to be a tow rope in place, but it is now gone. I have now decided that tele-skis are moving up on the priority list. There was about 6-10 inches of snow that we were trudging through, but still quite a few blueberry bushes sticking through, so it's not quite ski-able yet.
Even though it was slightly overcast and the full moon was incredibly bright, the northern lights still made an appearance, albeit brief. It actually must have been pretty bright to be able to see it in these conditions. It was even visible within the moon's halo for a few minutes.
Full moon shining bright with the green aurora appearing behind clouds.
Aurora, again showing behind the clouds. There are more pictures from this evening up on flickr.
I'm sure Jason has taken many great pictures as well. I'll post a link to them as soon as they're available.
Yesterday the Sun rose at 9:00 am Alaska time. Every day here is a totally new play on the lighting over the Tanana Valley and the Alaska Range. Yesterday was exceptional: clear, cold, bits o' fog, great color, and great illumination of the Alaska Range. Then at night the tallest mountains were illuminated. Four of us grad students stood outside in the cold for 20 minutes watching. Click on any of the photos to go to my flickr page.
The Sun, still rising over the western hills is inching closer to the southern Alaska Range every day.
Morning light on the Alaska Range. It was a little too overcast to see detail, but the lighting on the clouds was good.
Kate and I went for a drive again, this time driving southeast on the Alaska Highway. This is the same route we took into Alaska, but it was fairly overcast on the day we arrived so we didn't see much. On a clear day, like today the scenery is quite different; The views of Mt. Hayes and the Alaska Range are phenomenal. We stopped a few times along the Tanana River to take a few photos. It was very windy, very cold. There are already large chunks of ice floating downstream.
Alaska Range shadowing over the freezing Tanana River.
We turned around at one of the Scenic views and made our second stop on the way back at Harding Lake. This will be a great place to visit in the summer. The campsites looked really nice and the lake is beautiful. There were some fires smoldering just before reaching the lake. It looked like a controlled burn (or at least a well managed one).
Harding Lake, just south of Salcha, AK and north of Delta Junction. Great views of the Alaska Range and surrounding hills. Supposedly there is good fishing here too.
Leftover burn at Harding Lake. It looked like about 5 acres was left smoldering.
We went on to check out the knotty shop in Salcha. It's kind of a giant Alaska gift shop. There's a lot of touristy stuff, but also a lot of pretty nice Alaska made crafts. Watch out for the pure Alaskan gold vial (made in China). Then, while on our way back to Fairbanks we stopped along the Chena River. This was built by the Army Corp of Engineers as part of the Chena River Lakes Flood Control Project after a devastating flood hit Fairbanks in 1967. We spent some time exploring Chena Lake and the Chena River too. Most of the pictures are already on flickr, and I'll be putting many of them in my Alaska page.
A really good reason to live in Alaska. The Alaska Range never gets tiring to look at. Here's a new vantage point from on top of the Chena River Flood Control dam. There's a nice park here, with lots of bike trails.
The aurora stopped by again tonight and I was camera ready. With the help of spaceweather.com it's pretty easy to stay on top of things. The statistical auroral oval provided by NOAA lets me know when there's a good chance of seeing the lights so I can get ready. Even with tools provided from satellites and from magnetic flux measurements, it still takes some patience. Most of the time the light is very diffuse, just a dim glow in the sky or behind the trees. Other times it looks like this:
Oh, and there were new colors tonight. Orange! It was really visible too, but I wasn't fast enough and the optics weren't good enough to really photograph it well. Regardless, I managed to get quite a few photos tonight. I'll keep posting pictures on my flickr page: new aurora gallery.
Statistical Auroral Oval provided by NOAA. If you live in the northern U.S. you should bookmark this to see when you may have a good chance of viewing the northern lights.
I want to start advocating for the use of more opensource software. There is a whole philosophy with a lot of programmers that software should be freely distributed, many of them work incredibly hard to put together packages that anyone can use for free. Then there are a few developments that stand out far above the rest.
Tonight I want to tell you about stellarium. This is a planetarium software that shows you anything you want and more about the night sky. You can fast forward or go back in time, or go to any location and see what the night sky looks like. This is absolutely fantastic for anyone with kids or anyone who just wants to get familiar with the night sky. Panning is as easy as dragging, it shows constellations, planets, and has a huge library of objects in the sky along with information and sometimes images of that object. It is incredibly easy to use and is available for windows, mac, and linux. Go check it out.
with Kate. We had a wonderful Christmas morning and day and have finally had some good relaxation time. 
