This Year's Hyland Park Sprint
Posted Sun, March 29, 2009 - 9:40 PM
orienteering
Saturday was the latest installment of the MNOC Orienteering Clinic that we've held together with Three Rivers Parks for the last eight years.
As usual, I ran the advanced skills station over at Jan's Place with help from Tom and Justin. I also set up a sprint course to kickstart
our contribution to the Sprint Series (and allow some of our club members a chance to compete).
Map and course setter's thoughts below the fold.
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Pete Meets Moose
Alces alces
Well, that's an ambiguous title - actually it was two moose; a cow and calf, in late spring. It could have been a lot more dangerous than it actually turned
out. I think I ended up doing the right thing.
This happened several years ago, one afternoon in May, I think, when I was up on the North Shore. I drove up the Gunflint Trail, stopped various
places along the way, and was at the Magnetic Rock Trail in mid-afternoon.
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Baby, You're a Star! Part II
Posted Wed, March 25, 2009 - 10:57 PM
astronomy, science
To continue my previous post, these are a few more interesting celestial "characters".
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Random Shots
Here's a few more random photos I took in the past couple of weeks.
Playing around with exposure adjustments. Saturating the output leads to the "divine light" effect.
Desk
More photos below the fold.
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A World of Variety: Ktunaxa
Ktunaxa, better known as Kootenai,
is currently spoken by less than a dozen people in the world. Its original range was the far northwestern corner
of Montana and the panhandle of Idaho, extending north into interior British Columbia. It is not known to be related to any other languages
in the region or anywhere else in the world. Like many languages in west central North America, it's heavy on
consonants and consonant clusters.
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Neat Stuff on the Intertubes: "A Remarkable Storm"
Posted Fri, March 20, 2009 - 9:20 PM
minnesota, coolstuff
What's the heaviest rainstorm you've ever seen? For me, I'd have to say one summer night at
Wild River State Park (more on that in a later post.) But chances are, no matter where it might be, it
probably doesn't hold a candle to this story:
"The 18th of July 1867 will long be remembered by those persons who were, at
the time in the region comprising the counties of Pope, Douglas, and the western
part of Stearns..."
It was with these remarks that [George B.] Wright opened a paper entitled "Notes of a Remarkable
Storm" delivered on 8 March 1876 before the Minnesota Academy of Natural Science.
In this paper, Wright, who was part of a survey party operating at the time in an
area about 15 miles southwest of Glenwood in Pope County, states that he experienced
rainfall that was perhaps "without parallel in temperate climates".
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Aftermath of the Ham Lake Fire
On May 4, 2007, a careless camper in the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota left a fire burning without fully extinguishing it. Somehow,
somewhere, a few sparks must have been blown into the nearby woods and landed on flammable material, maybe pine needles. The few needles burned hot enough
to start a few twigs on fire, and the twigs didn't just go out, but managed to set even larger chunks on fire. Shortly thereafter, the first reports came into
the ranger station at Grand Marais of a smoke plume near Ham Lake. By the time the Minnesota DNR and U.S. Forest Service were able to assess the site,
it was obvious that a full wildfire was in progress.
Aftermath of the Ham Lake fire
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Sacagawea Summit and the Bridger Range
Primal Quest '08
Yours truly on a most awesome ridgeline - just south of Sacagawea Summit in the
Bridger Range
northeast of Bozeman, Montana.
It easy to see in the photos the unique nature of the central Montana mountains. Each range is fairly isolated and distinctively
sticks up out of the lower valleys, so, from the top of any one range you can look out and see the others appearing as islands in an
ocean of blue-green. From atop the Bridger Range we could look out to the east and see the Crazy Mountains; to the southeast, the Absaroka
Range; to the south; the Gallatin and Madison ranges; and to the west, the Tobacco Root mountains.
More photos below the fold.
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A World of Variety: Iñupiaq (Eskimo-Aleut)
Extent of the Eskimo-Aleut language family
Iñupiaq (pr: In-yoo-pee-ock) is a language spoken in the
far north of Alaska and the Yukon. It is one of the widely distributed Eskimo-Aleut languages, and lies near the western end of a dialect continuum
that sweeps from Alaska east to Greenland.
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Baby, You're a Star! Part I
Posted Thu, March 12, 2009 - 9:57 PM
astronomy, science
The next time you go outside at night, and it's clear with no moon out, look up. Did you know that each of those little stars you see
has a personality? And I'm not talking about that joke calling themselves the "International Star Registry".
Most of them look the same at first, but as you look harder you can tell some differences. First off, and most obviously,
some are brighter than others. Looking more closely, there's subtle differences in color - some look white, others are bluish, some are yellowish,
and some are reddish.
Astronomers go to a much higher level of detail by taking detailed spectra of stars - and even amateurs can do this with a small telescope and
inexpensive equipment - and from those spectra they can deduce a number of things about individual stars. Tongue in cheek, here's a few of the
more interesting "characters" in the sky
above you.
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