Saturday, June 28, 2008

California on fire




















Surface Smoke Map














Major Fires Map
As of Thursday afternoon, officials had identified 1,088 fires in Northern California that covered 159,000 acres. Pretty much unheard of.
More coming with dry lightening predictions this weekend. The air looks like LA on a very bad day. Yuck.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Jakles in the News!


















The Los Altos Town Crier publishes clips from the past as a regular feature. This clip is from 1958. Sharp-eyed Beverly spotted the photo in the current issue. Mrs. Jakle is standing on the left. Unfortunately, the 'Crier' doesn't include this feature in their electronic edition, and this scanned version is poor quality, but B. has saved the clipping.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

High Impact Anniversary

















This coming Monday June 30th is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska blast! Now thought to be from air-burst comet pieces, I remember the discussions as a kid about the idea that it could have been a particle of anti- matter. That was tough to get a grip on, a comet I can picture.

Last Monday I went for an early morning run with Jon H. who wanted to aerate his system in preparation for boarding a flight to Frankfurt,connecting to Moscow and from there to Krasnojarsk in Central Siberia to present two papers at a scientific conference on the Tunguska impact. He will have an opportunity to helicopter into the remote Tunguska region for a field trip. We expect pictures!

Here is the beginning of an Scientific American article well worth reading, summarizing past thinking on the event as well as current findings:

"June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia
Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high
and wide over the forest. . . . From . . . where the fire was,
came strong heat. . . . Then the sky shut closed, and a strong
thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such
noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook ...”
Such is the harrowing testimony of one of the closest eyewitnesses
to what scientists call the Tunguska event, the largest
impact of a cosmic body to occur on the earth during modern
human history. Semenov experienced a raging conflagration some
65 kilometers (40 miles) from ground zero, but the effects of the
blast rippled out far into northern Europe and Central Asia as
well. Some people saw massive, silvery clouds and brilliant, colored
sunsets on the horizon, whereas others witnessed luminescent
skies at night—Londoners, for instance, could plainly read
newsprint at midnight without artificial lights. Geophysical
observatories placed the source of the anomalous seismic and
pressure waves they had recorded in a remote section of Siberia.
The epicenter lay close to the river Podkamennaya Tunguska, an
uninhabited area of swampy taiga forest that stays frozen for eight
or nine months of the year......Read the rest of the Scientific American Article HERE

Friday, June 20, 2008

John & Thomas Favorite Summer Movie



A classic from the King County Library Summer Reading Program. Aclaimed as top movie for writing, acting, cinemetography and stunts by the Jakle Bros. Relax and Enjoy! Thanks, boys.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Bike Mania


Daughter and Dad (Em and Marty) take a break from bombing down Harkin's Ridge Trail to enjoy the immense sun glittering late afternoon vista over HMB and Pillar Point. Ahead: a drop into the deep, cool redwood & fern shade of Purissima Canyon and a long, long granny-gear grind up the Purissima Creek Fire Road.

A paucity of surf has driven the Kings Mountain Surf Team to static wave (a.k.a. mountain) thrill seeking. Unlike the ocean, since the start is on the peak, the killer paddle-out comes after dropping down the wave. So far, the prize for mountain bike madness goes to -you guessed it - Mr B. A. Bob who pedaled UP the Grabtown Gulch Trail (an unthinkable climb)instead of down as the normal do, to conduct a successful search and rescue on my camera, lost the day before. I really didn't want to have to tell Beverly that it was gone. Thanks Bob, a big bottle of Chimay comin' your way, dude.













Two recently favored bike routes.

















The 'A' Team

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Fly Away Home










Jon Explaining a Chart of Pigeon Vanishing Bearings

The earth is ringing; an ultra-low frequency bell. The reverberation of ocean water in motion is the most consistent clapper, although there are many other sources. Jon Hagstrum has shown that these ultra long sound waves, (infrasound) modulated by atmospheric conditions and topography, create the sonic map used by pigeons (and perhaps many other animals) to navigate.

A few weeks ago I met Doug and Beth for dinner and an evening listening to Jon present a updated summary of findings in his 30 year long quest to understand avian navigation

The research has moved to a new level with Jon's discovery and updating of HARPA, a powerful, if somewhat antique program written by Mike Jones in the 1980s (in FORTRAN !) that allows the user to enter atmospheric information like wind speed, temperature, barometric pressure, altitude and topography and to then model the propagation of acoustic waves –including infrasound. After much work to enable the program to run more reliably on today’s computers, Jon is able to input atmospheric and geophysical data from specific days and locations, model infrasound propagation under those conditions and to then search for correlations with changes in the homing behavior of pigeons.








Speed Of Sound by Temperature and Elevation

(Including angles of reflection from various surface sources angels)

What I find striking in hearing Jon’s research is not only his key finding of the role of infra sound as the map pigeons use in navigation, but also the building process of science in which one advance is made possible only by many others. The work of Mike Jones provides an essential tool, but more important is the work of William Keeton, a great biology professor, researcher and member of the Neurobiology and Behavior Department at Cornell, whose research and passion for the subject provided the spark and much of the data to make Jon’s work possible.

As an undergraduate at Cornell in the 1970s, Jon heard a lecture by Dr. Keeton .







William Keeton & friend

Having kept homing pigeons as a boy, Keeton was a pioneer in avian navigation studies and he founded a research pigeon loft. At its peak over 2000 pigeons were kept at the Cornell loft. Students and researchers compiled detailed data on the homing behavior of pigeons released in the area. Many experiments were conducted on the variables that seemed to influence the ability to home. My personal favorite: pigeons released with small bar magnets attached to their bodies to test the role of magnetic fields in navigation. (Result – the bird’s ability to orient quickly was affected, but not their ability to home.) Keeton’s research revealed that there are multiple cues used by homing pigeons and that when one failed, another was used. For example, the sun clearly played a role in orientation, but trained pigeons could orient and home quite well on overcast days too. And adding to the mystery of avian navigation and the value of Keeton’s data was the presence of two locations in the research area where homing ability was predictably disrupted. What was going on? He spent his life as a researcher trying to tease out the mechanism for pigeon homing. From the efforts of Keeton, his colleagues and students, much was learned and a huge data base was amassed documenting pigeon homing behavior on an almost daily basis over many years in the Cornell area. But key problems remained unsolved.

Essentially the ability of the birds to use a variety of cues as a compass became fairly well understood. But you can't navigate with a compass alone. For a compass to be useful you must have a map. What do pigeons use for their map?

Although Jon heard only that single lecture, William Keeton’s quest to crack the mystery of pigeon navigation – and by extension other long range animal navigators- permanently and powerfully aroused his own curiosity. The possibility of infrasound playing a role seemed plausible to him and remained in the back of his mind- a thought to be re awakened, more than 20 years later, after reading of disrupted pigeon races in Pennsylvania. Jon knew that if he could identify a source of infrasound that could have caused the disruption that he would have an important confirmation of the role of infrasound. And he did find the link – the infrasonic shockwave of the Concorde landing at JFK. Hagstrum.

Armed with the HARPA software, NOAA's detailed records of amospheric conditions and Keetons data, Jon will now be able to run analysis for correlations between pigeon navigation patterns and infrasound propagation under the the wind, temprature, pressure, humidity of that day, location and time. And of course be able to run new experiments. I'd say the role of infrasound in navigation is about to be irrefutably nailed down!

Next research frontier: How do tiny little pigeons heads have room for a mechanism able detect wave lenghts in the 100s of meters? Could it somehow be akin to the fractal antennae used in cell phones?

Can't wait for Jon's work on infrasound to be applied to other long distance animal navigator mysteries.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Bombs Away
















A
Douglas SBD Dauntless Dive Bomber;

fully armed, dive brakes extended, a beautiful admirer standing by and a veteran pilot in the background displayed on the hanger deck of the USS Midway in San Diego. The Midway was in service from WWII through Desert Storm and is now a huge floating museum anchored in San Diego. Aside from being able to see the many of the most important parts of the ship's facilities, it is also a major aircraft museum with every prop plane, jet and helicopter that had operated from the carrier including the F/A 18 Hornet, F-14 Tomcat, F-4 Phantom and A-6 Avenger among many others. Beverly and I had a chance to do a quick tour last Sunday and it was well worth it. GO if you are in San Diego. Building and operating these has to be one of the more amazing feat of organization in human history. Too bad it's for blowing things up.

More pictures from our tour HERE











The
George Washington,
seen over
Midway's flght deck
While we were touring the Midway we were able to glimpse a currently operating carrier, the George Washington anchored across the harbor, behind big anti terrorist booms on the water. This modern nuclear powered super carrier had arrived in San Diego only a few day earlier after being damaged by a below deck fire that occurred off the coast of South America. Coincidentally, the GW was on its way to Yokosuka Naval Base, the last home port the Midway had. The GW will be the first nuke powered carrier to be based in Japan.










The
Air Boss's Launch-Recovery
schedule board overlooking Midway's flight deck








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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

We Need A Space Rock Defense !



Price of gas got you down? Does the dog have fleas? Wish Hillary got the nomination? Put it all in perpective: watch this Gregg Easterbrook video narrating the key points from his current Atlantic Monthly article on the high probability of earth impacts and the need for NASA to get with it if they want to save the planet(Come on guys!) Maybe you don't have to clean out the garage after all. One of these babies could solve global warming -after the rain of superheated particles, of course. The video is about 11 min long.

Jon H. is attending a scientific conference in Siberia commemorating the Tunguska impact which occurred 100 years ago this June 30th. Even though it was an air blast scientists believe a crater has now been located. We expect a full report from him on Tunguska as well as an update on the current understanding of impact frequency and consequences!