Category Archives: Did you know?
What children need to know about grandparents
If the grandchildren are having problems connecting with the grandparents, maybe they don’t know the secret.
I found it in a surfer shop in Coronado a few days ago and believe it needs to be shared with the world:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Civil unioned, domestic partnered, common lawed, or married?
Long-time readers might remember that Jim and I met on May 26, 1994 (we do celebrate that day), moved in together on November 1, 1995, got domestic partnered in California on July 31, 2004, and got married in California on October 30, 2008.
Some people, mostly homophobic conservative religious republicans, might wonder why we got married when we were already domestic partnered. The reason is because they are different, especially when it comes to recognition by the public, “the public” being defined here as businesses.
A great example is what happened to me this morning. The car blew a 120A fuse yesterday, but if a 120A fuse blows, there’s something seriously wrong. Thus, the car had to go to Pep Boys to be checked out.
Meanwhile, I went to rent a car from Enterprise, which has a secret location about a mile from me. I have done lots of business with them over the years but this morning was totally different, unexpected, and pleasant.
As the Enterprise representative was confirming that none of my information has changed, he saw that I had a wedding ring on but that I didn’t have a traditional spouse listed as a reference or anything. He saw that Jim was listed and asked me who Jim was. I proudly said “He’s my husband.” The Enterprise rep asked me if I was “legally married” to Jim and I said, “Yes,” at which point he told me that Jim would automatically be listed as an alternate driver. When I said Jim wouldn’t be driving the car he said, “That’s okay. He’ll still be listed as an alternate driver in case there’s an emergency and you’re not able to drive.”
“Oh. That’s pretty nice. Thank you.”
He explained that Enterprise’s policy is to list spouses as alternative drivers, but spouses are still defined as “married” only and does not include domestic partnerships, civil unions, or even “common law marriages.”
So there you have it. Just one more reason why GLBTQ people want to get married. Not to mention it’s just easier to say — civil unioned, domestic partnered, common lawed, or married? Married, please.
Thank you to Minnesota, Delaware, and Rhode Island for being the most recent three states to pass marriage equality in the past couple of weeks.
Marriage equality laws currently exist in these places:
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Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Uruguay.
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United States: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Delaware, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
What is it?
“What is it?” I’m glad you asked, because you’re not the first. Apparently so many people have asked that they put up a sign:
SDG&E is San Diego Gas & Electric.
NIC&E is… Ain’t got a clue. When I Google NIC&E, nothing. At least nothing useful for us here.
The sign on the vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) kind of leads one to believe that this is “the first of its kind in the U.S.” Not necessarily true. They have been around since just before World War II, and the largest one is located in Cap-Chat, Quebec, Canada, which, of course, to those of us who are not geographically challenged, is not in the U.S.
According to Wikipedia, with VAWTs, “the main rotor shaft is set vertically and the main components are located at the base of the turbine.” There are three main advantages to such a design: (1) generators and gearboxes can be placed close to the ground, making them easier to service, (2) VAWTs do not need to be pointed into the wind like the airplane propeller-type of wind turbine, and (3) they are small and quiet.
So there you have it. You now know what a vertical axis wind turbine is. And there are hundreds of different designs, so perhaps this is the first of this design “in the United States.”
Oh, wait!
I guess you want to see the design of the one here in San Diego.
Here is a picture taken at dusk last night over on Harbor Island (it’s not an island) while I was taking gorgeous sunset pictures (yes, you’ll get to see some of those, too, but later!):
Since the VAWT can be much smaller than the regular airplane propeller-type of wind turbine, they are much less visually offensive and much quieter, capable of being installed in residential areas. You could have one of these in your back yard!
The big disadvantage of VAWTs is that, up until recently, they simply have not been reliable, sometimes suffering catastrophic failure where the blades blew apart.
The largest VAWTs in the United States are located in my home state of Texas on the campus of Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. Just 45 miles or so from Corpus Christi, in the small (population 25,000) South Texas ranching and farming community of Kingsville, someone you know was born on March 11, 1955. Care to guess who that was?
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Here’s looking at you!
It was a bright, sunny, and warm afternoon today, so I went down to Balboa Park to check out the cactus garden since cacti love bright, sunny, warm days. Officially the cactus garden is called the Desert Garden and is located at 2525 Park Boulevard, just north of the Inez Parker Grant Memorial Rose Garden (everyone knows where the roses are!).
Throughout Balboa Park, but particularly in the Rose Garden and the Desert Garden, the flower displays are stunning right now. I’ll feature the Rose Garden in this week’s Friday Flower Fiesta.
The Desert Garden has more than 1,300 plants from around the world on 2½ acres. One of the interesting cactus species in the Desert Garden is the Golden Barrel Cactus (Echinopsis grusonii).
In Texas we called it the “horse crippler” because if you were riding in the boondocks and your horse misstepped on a Golden Barrel Cactus, it could easily be crippled. Unfortunately, the Golden Barrel Cactus, while extremely popular in city cactus gardens, is rare and critically endangered in the wild.
Small, yellow flowers appear on the crown of the cactus but usually only after the plant is about twenty years old.
Look back at the first picture and notice that the plant appears to be leaning. It’s not. It’s simply exhibiting phototropism, a plant characteristic first named heliotropism by A.P. de Candolle in 1832. If you grow plants indoors, phototropism is what causes the plants to grow towards a light source, and why most gardening books tell you to place a plant light directly above your plants or to rotate them regularly so that they will grow evenly.
The Golden Barrel Cactus is one of the best plants to observe phototropism. If you were to plant one in a pot and let it grow for a few months, it would appear to lean towards the sun. You could then rotate it 180° and in another couple of months it would be leaning towards the sun again.
In extreme cases — and I know of one place here — younger Golden Barrel Cacti planted where they get up to twelve hours of sun each day, can be observed facing east for the morning sun and south for the midday sun, ultimately facing west as the sun sets.
Here is another picture from the Desert Garden showing several of these cacti leaning west, towards the setting sun:
I walked around so that I appeared to be in front of them. It appeared that they were looking at me, reminding me of the movie Casablanca. “Here’s looking at you!”
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Speaking of sunflowers, Fermat’s spiral, and Fibonacci numbers….
Speaking of sunflowers…..
What?
You don’t remember us speaking of sunflowers?
We spoke of them in yesterday’s Friday Flower Fiesta!
So, as I was saying, speaking of sunflowers….
Did you know that what most people think of as the flower of the sunflower….
….is actually not a flower at all? It’s called an inflorescence, or flowering head, and comprises many hundreds of flowers, called florets. Each floret is capable of being pollinated and creating a seed, which is why you get hundreds of seeds from each inflorescence “flower.” The yellow petals around the flower are not flower petals at all. They are modified leaves, called bracts.
What I find extraordinarily interesting is how those little florets are arranged.
DISCLAIMER: I love mathematics, which is why Numb3rs is one of my favorite TV shows.
Those little flowers, those florets, are arranged in a certain pattern, described by Helmut Vogel in June 1979 (“A better way to construct the sunflower head,” Mathematical Biosciences 44 (44): 179–189). The arrangement of the florets is called “Fermat’s spiral” and involves Fibonacci numbers (made famous in the book and movie “The Da Vinci Code”) and the golden angle of 137.508 degrees, the approximate ratio of Fibonacci numbers, a sequence of numbers whereby the following number in the sequence is the sum of the preceding two numbers. The plain vanilla Fibonacci sequence begins with 0, 1:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584….
A sequence doesn’t have to begin with 0, 1 though. Pick any two numbers to start. Figure out the remaining nine numbers for this sequence:
4, 2
What does this mean to the sunflower and to us? Well, if you look at the inflorescence, you can see the spirals of the florets. Here’s my best picture showing the spirals:
Even more interesting is that the spirals go clockwise and counterclockwise, and the number of clockwise and counterclockwise spirals can be predicted using Fermat’s spiral and Fibonacci numbers.
Count the spirals going in one direction. Let’s say that we have 34 spirals going clockwise. In the other direction, counterclockwise, we’ll have either 21 spirals or 55 spirals, depending on the size of the inflorescence. See where I got those numbers? Look at the Fibonacci sequence of numbers up above. Find 34 and look for the numbers on either side of 34, which are 21 and 55!
You can even predict the pattern of the spirals if you simply count the number of florets. For example, if there are 500 florets in the sunflower inflorescence, here’s the predicted pattern:
Of course, the actual number of spirals and how beautifully they are arranged depends on Mother and Father Nature cooperating. If the plant suffers for water or nutrients, or little bugs eat part of the plant — things like that — the number and beauty of the spirals could be substantially different.
Does all of this have a practical application? Yes! Fermat’s spiral has been found to be the most efficient layout for concentrated solar power plants, due to the curvature of the Earth, distance from the sun, etc.
Here are some other sunflower pictures from my photograph collection. Not until two years ago while roaming the campus of San Diego State University (just a mile from where I live) did I know that sunflowers naturally come in colors other than sunny yellow.
What other famous plant can you name where the flower actually is not a flower but instead is an inflorescence surrounded by bracts?
Hint: It’s very popular around Christmas time.
That’s right, boys and girls, the poinsettia!
The big, beautiful “petals” are not petals at all, but are modified leaves called bracts. Look at the following picture and you can see all the teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy yellow flowers in the middle of the bracts:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
My, what interesting ears you have
I went to SeaWorld this morning for my daily walk. Try as I might to walk right by the seals and sea lions, I can never do it.
Except for the second picture, those all are sea lions. The second picture is a seal. Know the easiest way to tell the difference? Sea lions have external ear flaps, seals have a smooth surface with just an ear hole.
All of the seals this morning were sleeping while the sea lions were posing and eating. Here’s a California sea lion proudly showing you his external ear flap:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Life can be so complicated
Yesteday I found out that not all WordPress blogs are created equal. It caused me a lot of frustration.
Jim and I have six WordPress things going on, three hosted by WordPress.com and three self-hosted at Bluehost, whereby we simply downloaded the WordPress software from WordPress.org.
We like the WordPress.com sites much better than our self-hosted sites. I never understood why until yesterday when I was trying to set up Classical Street. If you look at that site, you’ll see that there is no FOLLOW link at the top and there are no LIKE buttons at the end of each post. I worked furiously yesterday trying to get them to show up. I got FOLLOW to show up but only as an obnoxious button at the borrom right corner, inconvenient at the least. I mean, who ever looks at the bottom right corner? That’s almost the last spot on my screen that I ever look at. I never got the LIKE button to show up.
I went to the WordPress support forums and didn’t find an answer so I started my own thread. Finally someone said that self-hosted WordPress software doesn’t have those two functions and there are no Plug-ins or Widgets to provide them. I thought that was interesting. Seems like someone out there would have created by now a Plug-in or Widget to provide them.
Having discovered that, I left the original Classical Street sitting there and created a new Classical Street that is hosted by WordPress.com. Now I have FOLLOW and LIKE. Once I figure out how to get my domain name away from my host, I’ll give it to WordPress.com and I’ll be back to having a FOLLOW & LIKE site with just the classicalstreet.com URL.
There were other issues, too, which I addresses a few months ago in a blog post about navigating around blogs, previous and next buttons/arrows, etc. All the things I was complaining about are indigenous to the WordPress.org downloadable self-hosting software but not the WordPress.com software. Looks like I’m going to be a WordPress.com person from here on out.
Life can be so complicated.
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Babylicious strangles babies playing with machetes
I saw the movie “Carrie” in 1976 at a midnight showing. That caused me to read the book by Stephen King upon which the movie was based. That caused me to be a lifelong Stephen King fan.
The Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a recall today titled “Gerber recalls machetes due to laceration hazard.” I’m thinking, first, What are the Gerber babies doing with machetes? Second, Well of course little babies playing with machetes are subject to laceration hazards…. Der!
What made this recall notice even funnier is another recall issued at the same time: “Babylicious Recalls Cloth Crib Fringe Due to Strangulation Hazard.” I’m thinking, first, What company would name itself Babylicious? Second, I can’t get the visual out of my mind about Babylicious purposely creating a strangulation hazard for babies playing with machetes. I’m thinking maybe a new Stephen King book is in the works.
For more information:
Looking for real estate services in San Diego County?
I can highly recommend
James Frimmer, Realtor
Century 21 Award, DRE #01458572
If you’re looking for a home inspector,
I recommend Russel Ray — that’s me!
Google Maps Street View is kind of neat
When I first discovered Google Maps’ Street View, I was not impressed. I saw it as an invasion of privacy. Still do. However, that has not prevented me from using it for my own personal needs. Hypocritical? Probably. Nonetheless. It’s the world we live in. lol
I recently endeavoured to find all the homes that I had ever lived in. What an interesting project.
The following is the home that my parents were living in, in 1955 when I was born. It was my mom’s parents’ home in Kingsville, Texas, all the way up to the mid-1990s:
This is the home in Kingsville, Texas, that we lived in ca. 1956 to 1960. At the right side of the house you see a somewhat pointed roof. That’s the living room, and there is a row of windows under the eaves. Birds would always fly into those windows, cracking the windows and killing themselves in the process.
When my dad got a promotion with Missouri Pacific Railroad, we moved to Palestine, Texas, ca. 1959. This is where we lived until my dad killed himself in January 1961. It took me forever to find this home because no one remembered the address. I finally found a death certificate online which had the address of the home. Imagine 55 years of not knowing the address where you lived when your dad died.
The following is where we lived in Brigham City, Utah, after my mom remarried. I lived here until December 1965 when I was shipped off to Kingsville, Texas, to live with my paternal grandparents.
My wise old grandmother’s house in Kingsville, Texas. I lived here from December 1965 to August 1973 when I went off to college at Texas A&M University:
I helped plant those two Texas live oaks in the Spring of 1967. Nice to see that they are still there. You can see storm shutters on the windows. Granddad and I installed those after Hurricane Beulah had destroyed Kingsville in September 1967. Our house escaped with just shingles torn off the roof, although we lost the two trees that my Great Horned Owl and the Screech Owls lived in. I was so sad. Granddad built that house in 1937, and I can assure you that they don’t build them like that nowadays. By the way, I intensely disliked mowing that lawn twice a week. Explains why I’ve never had a grass lawn.
Google has won me over with its translator!
I dislike liking something that I haven’t read. So when I’m camping out in a blog where there are lots of long posts that I want to read, I’ll often read them all first and then go back through real quickly and like all of them.
The reading problem is exacerbated when the blog is in a foreign language. I’m not good at foreign languages.
In fact, at Henrietta M. King High School in Kingsville, Texas (see map at right), I made my only two non-A’s in Spanish; my high school required that we take two semesters of a foreign language.
At Texas A&M University, my major required me to take two semesters of computer science, another foreign language. I made two C’s…. barely. In the second semester I had an F going into the final. This was back in the card punch days. My final exam was to write a program in COBOL that would spit out the initial of my last name. I spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — 72 hours — in the Computer Science Center trying…. no luck. On Monday morning at 7:00 a.m. for an 8:00 a.m. class, I simply sat down and used comment cards to create the initial. I knew I was going to get an F, but I had fun.
When I went to see my grade, there was a note next to my name: “See Professor.” Ooopsie.
I went to see the Professor only to find that I had an A on the final and a C in the course! Yahooooooooooooo! He said that comment cards weren’t programming but he liked my ingenuity since no one had ever done that before. Reminds me of the Star Trek movie (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and 2009′s Star Trek) where Captain Kirk defeats the Kobayashi Maru test by re-programming it.
This all brings me back to those foreign-language posts. I just discovered the Google Translator. It’s awesome! And fast! Just go to translate.google.com and enter the URL of the blog post you want to translate and — voilà! — just seconds later you’re reading in English…. or any other language!
I feel like an emperor!
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