Irrelevance Glorified

I’m back with the next installment of the Nano-man series. If you didn’t catch the first installment of the series, you can find that here. Again, these stories were written in high school, during my Freshman year biology class. We had to come up with stories of some sort that incorporated the chapter’s vocabulary words. We had moved on from the basic structures of the cell, and getting into chemistry and molecules. And you can’t talk very much about biochemistry without getting into acids and bases. Hmmm…..acids….bases….pH values….what could that have to do with a character named GoldpHinger? Egged on by the positive encouragement given to me by my biology teacher and some of my classmates, I furthered the mythology of Nano-man’s world. I kept with the unoriginal parody thing, though, and borrowed from the works of Ian Fleming. How could I pass up the opportunity to play off of different types of chemical bonding? Continue Reading »

This is a bit out of order, but whatever. Last July, I decided to spend Independence day in Seattle, visiting my good friends Cameron and Gina. It was my first visit to their place since their kid, Ariana, was born. My visit was also a catalyst for our old college friend, Dave, to visit from Champaign. I think he enjoyed the west coast.

I had heard that Seattle put on a decent fireworks show, but due to budget restrictions, they canceled it that year. After a furious donation drive effort, though, Seattleites raised enough money to put on the show anyways. Personally, I think that’s a bad precedent to set. Now, they’ll never get funding for a fireworks show. Anyways, we were going to go to the fireworks show, but the weather was somewhat uncertain, and we had a baby to transport as well. So we decided not to go to the fireworks, but try and check it out from the upstairs balcony, which technically had a view. But some trees were blocking the view of some of the shells, so we decided to check it out on the TV. After watching it on TV for a while….we remembered that watching fireworks on TV is usually not very entertaining. So we watched a movie. However, I did enjoy reflecting on this gradual descent through various levels of laziness.

Flickr set here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures and Descriptions after the Jump.

Continue Reading »

Well, in the last post, I claimed that I was only like six months behind on pictures. Then I actually looked through all the pictures in my camera and realized that I was quite wrong. So, I’ll just see if I can’t play some catch up (seriously).

Most of the hikes I go on are in the Bay Area proper. I’ve joined a few Bay Area MeetUp groups, so the selection of hikes is usually some sort of compromise where each location is reasonable no matter where you live. This week was a bit different, in that the destination was quite a ways south, near Big Sur. If I lived up in San Francisco, this might be prohibitively far away, but it works out decent enough for those of us down at the South end of the bay.

This weekend’s selection was Andrew Molera State Park, which lies right along the ocean near Big Sur. The trail is mostly exposed, with all the vegetation being scrubby bushes, probably because of all the salt mist. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of wildflowers, though. We started out from the parking lot heading towards the beach, then hung a left and took the ridge trail up some steepish hills. The view would have been spectacular…if it hadn’t had been cloudy. The clouds in themselves weren’t so bad — mornings are often cloudy in California. The clouds/fog gradually retreats towards the coast as the sun rises, until only blue skies remain. However, since we were right on the coast, and not particularly lucky this day, the clouds lasted most of the hike. This was good news for those easily sunburned, but a bit disappointing to me. The ridge trail loops around to the Panorama and Bluff Trails, which skirt the coastline at a lower elevation than the ridge. From there, there are a few easy opportunities to head down to the beach, which we took advantage of before heading back to the trailhead. All in all, it was pretty enjoyable, and we went a little further south to grab an early dinner at a nice restaurant with a view.

I ended up taking some pictures of plants, but as usual, I didn’t know what they were. I figured that there had to be some wildflower identification sites out there, so I did some searching. The first resource I found was sponsored by the California Academy of Sciences, and was a database of flowers. This was exactly what I was looking for, in that it allowed me to search by color and and number of petals, which is about as much as a flower ignoramus such as me could handle. However, it wasn’t quite as comprehensive as I needed. That’s when I stumbled upon Calflora.org, which is a database of all sorts of California plants, both flowers and non-flowering plants. The awesome part of it was the What Grows Here? database, where you could put in a city or county or a state park and it would list all the species that they’ve found in that area. Pretty sweet. Due to that, I think I identified most of the flowers that I took pictures of.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures & Descriptions After the Jump

Continue Reading »