This is still on one floor of one stairwell at work and I keep assuming that sometime over the years I must have taken photos of it, but if I did I never named them and they are lost in the hundreds of thousands of files. So, here’s a set!
Last night was cloudy before the thunderstorms moved in, no view of the sky. But at 3AM I woke up to pee and looked at my watch which gets weather via bluetooth from the phone, and it was reporting clear, and I thought maybe I’d go out and see if there was anything to see. Glad I did!
I’m over fifty, many times over the decades there have been predictions of aurora visible far into the south, but I’ve never seen anything at all. Here at 43° north its certainly not visible often. I had no real idea what it really looks like. You see photos but time exposures of dim things in the dark are not really representative of the real experience. There’s lots of things that look a lot more spectacular in person than in a photo, but you can see a photo and have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like. This, not so much.
I put on a night dress and slipped on shoes and went out to the back/side yard. The sky was cloudless. Looking around I saw what looked like a few scattered high thin clouds, stars visible through them. When you live in a city you are used to clouds at night being lit up. But they’d fade, and suddenly appear, and move in a way quite different from the steady drift in the wind of clouds. That’s the thing! I put a coat on and spent a good long time out past three in the morning looking up.
Sometimes scattered splotches of light, sometimes many, sometimes suddenly popping into appearance. Often a vertical striped appearance. For an interval it really picked up, I was craning my neck to look up to the zenith, rays of light radiating down suddenly appearing and fading, lower the shimmering flickering effects in the sheets of light. Aurora from zenith to just above tree/house level maybe a third of the way around the circle of the horizon. It looked white to my eyes except for an interval when a segment out of the expanse was in very clear purple.
I was holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the lights on the building, looking up above the streetlights, in a city where we take for granted nighttime clouds are lit up. What this would look like in a dark place!
Hey Beige, I hear you say, now that you are scanning stuff with your fancy sheet-feeder scanner, don’t you have some other weird old documents to share?
Yeah, I’ve got this Cray Y-MP Functional Description Manual that I actually ordered from Cray Research back in, according to the packing list, February, 1991, 33 years ago. I, like, mailed in a check or something, I don’t remember exactly, of course. They didn’t just have a PDF on their web page, in 1990! I guess, you know, I really have always been like this…
Anyway, I scanned it. Here’s the 191 megabyte PDF:
Did I feel like I needed a scanner with a sheet-feeder? Not really, but now that I have one you betcha I pulled my copy of the “operating instruction manual for superconducting magnet system” from Cryomagnetics out of the 3-ring binder and fed it through. If you’re the kind of nerd who wants a copy it’s only 29 megabytes. I put a pdf up on a backblaze b2 bucket:
We got our laser (one of the lasers…) replaced in the Bruker timsTOF fleX MALDI 2 (I looked up the official weird capitalization just for you) on Friday. The laser, which costs something like as much as a nice car, looks like a gray metal box with a bunch of random cable connectors plus a flat metal plate that I guess must get Real Hot because a heat pipe and fan thingie gets bolted to it. Which is what real lasers normally look like. But back in the day we had this DNA sequencer that used an argon ion laser to excite the fluorescent dyes used in the sequencing chemistry, and that laser, holy crap, that laser was a shiny black metal cylinder with a bigger cylinder on one end and a gigantic power cable, and it looked exactly like a movie prop laser. Like it seriously looked exactly like a prop from Star Wars or Trek or whatever. The most laser prop looking real laser ever.
I’ve been looking through my old photographic slides, so far those from the late 90s, and it fun to look through them. There are a few of my mom in there from when she was roughly the age I am now. It’s funny, the way I would take photos thinking of what was interesting at the time. I visited the old house to do some work up on the roof and have photos of the roof, because how often do you climb on the roof? That’s an interesting subject for photos! I didn’t take any of mom, because mom’s just around all the time, right? Twenty-five years later…I wish I’d taken a couple of mom while I was there, you know?
From the cockpit voice recorder:
01:53:13.2 HOT-2
there was a fatal accident in the UK and this is exactly what happened there.
01:53:28.9
END OF TRANSCRIPT
END OF RECORDING
The good: The copilot recognized they were in a dangerous situation very similar to one that had led to a fatal accident.
The bad: He said that fifteen seconds before their own fatal crash.
I picked up a new prescription at a new pharmacy and ended up having the experience of hearing the patient, who is in fact me, referred to as “he” in the third person repeatedly. Presumably the Michael dude who it’s for couldn’t come in, and whoever I am, his wife or girlfriend maybe1, am picking it up. Whenever this kind of thing happens I think, do I want to explain this? No. No, I do not want to explain.
Honestly I have these thoughts wondering if they know and are jerking me around in some sort of deniable way. Like, they might get into trouble with the management if they actually said a slur or something but if you just act confused what can anyone say? But I spent years being just obviously a person with a beard wearing dresses, and no one hassled me about it, no one pretended to be confused or made anything difficult. So having had that experience, I think people really don’t notice, are actually unaware. I never expected that to actually happen!
Obviously I’m wearing a respirator, but today with two days of fuzz growth all around the edges because tomorrow is electrolysis day. I might have imagined a numbing cream specifically described in the prescription as for electrolysis might hint at the use but who knows, could be for all sorts of things I guess.
“Passing” is the weirdest thing.
To be fair, that dude probably would have liked a girl like me. ↩︎
“Feasibility Study of Mining Coal in an Oxygen Free Atmosphere; A Demonstration of a New Mining Technique to Prevent the Formation of Mine Acid in an Active Deep Mine: Phase I”
The miner in the proposed process must work in an atmosphere that will have less than 0.1% oxygen and will be at 100% relative humidity. The life support system thus must not only supply breathing oxygen but must remove carbon dioxide all without contributing significantly to the oxygen content in the mine.
The idea was to avoid acid mine drainage by excluding the oxygen that oxidizes the pyrites to produce the sulfates by simple mining in inert gas with the miners wearing life support suits. This has real “guys will write a long proposal for coal mining in inert atmospheres before going to therapy” energy. 1970 was a weird time in environmentalism!