It has been a wonderful trip from the state of "Mary" or Maryland as most know it, to Portland and back. We were blessed to spend 4 weeks with Clara, Margaret and Mary Halvorson in their lovely home up there on Mount Tabor. After one of the longest plane rides I have ever taken we were greeted by smiling faces, liquid sunshine and mild temperatures. They sure know how to set the stage for a great visit with pizza in the oven for the kids and pair of cold Black Butte Porters for Jean and I. Life just can't seem to get better that that sometimes. Over the coming days we were inundated with social activities of all kinds. Christmas was fast approaching. The kids counting down the days 4,3,2,Christmas eve!
We traveled to friends houses, they traveled to see us. Clara's house was a beehive of activity that lasted for days on end. That first week we went to bed at nearly 3pm EST every night.
Margaret plied us with delicious dinners. Mary kept finding sweet treats to put out on the counter. We all ate way too much and had a grand time doing it. Christmas Eve was a big deal. The other Halvorsons gathered along with my sister Tracy and Nephew Gabe, our friends the Kaminskis/Lahodneys, the Hales - Dina and Rob, sister Joyce, and I am sure more were there.
The following morning arrived early. The kids had done their obligatory stocking raids and were comparing gifts when I arrived for coffee. It was a slow relaxing day. The kind you want to never end. The weather was blustery so staying inside suited us best. Bring on the baked ham and mashed potatoes!
Our time between Christmas and New Years was quickly spent on visits by friends and visiting friends ourselves. We had a great time having a beer with Becky and Mike Tetherow at a little pub down off Belmont. Clara, Mary, Margaret, Jean and I went to a really chic place called Bar Avignon on Division st. Very trendy, a much younger crowd. It felt like I was in a bistro in Paris. Portland is in many ways being fashioned after Paris by the 30 somethings that have spent time there and since moved to Portland. The look and feel of the city has changed a great deal since I first laid eyes on it. Mostly gone are the Pink mowhawk headed grungies of Hawthorn. They have morphed into the more affluent METRO personalities that abound on every street corner and coffee house.
Portland has so far succeeded in keeping itself weird. Let's hope the new weird begins to take better care of the city that has adopted so many of us outsiders.
But Stumptown politics aside,how can you complain about a place where people smile more when it rains, hold doors for you when your hands are full, and are so optimistic about their futures. Portland is a hard place to beat!
I will close here and come back to more exciting news about our trip on the next installment.
Fair Winds
Scott
About the Omarsea Crew
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Travel at the Speed of Light
A Brief History of the Speed of
Light
by Ben Trefethen
In 1667, Galileo Galilei tried to determine the speed of light.
He and an assistant each had lamps which could be covered and uncovered Galileo would uncover his lamp, and as soon as his assistant saw the light he would uncover his. By measuring time that it took for the light to pass between him and his assistant and knowing the distance Galileo reasoned he should be able to determine the speed of the light. His conclusion was that light traveled If not instantaneous then extraordinarily rapid"
In 1675, the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer noticed, while observing Jupiter's moons, that the times of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter seemed to depend on the relative positions of Jupiter and Earth. If Earth was close to Jupiter, the orbits of her moons appeared to speed up. If Earth was farther away from Jupiter, they seemed to slow down. Reasoning that the moons orbital velocities should not be affected by their separation, he deduced that the apparent difference must be due to the extra time for light to travel when Earth was more distant from Jupiter. Using the commonly accepted value for the diameter of the Earth's orbit, he came to the conclusion that light must have traveled at 200,000 Km/s.
In 1728 James Bradley, an English physicist, estimated the speed of light in vacuum to be around 301,000 km/s. He used stellar aberration to calculate the speed of light. Stellar aberration causes the apparent position of stars to change due to the motion of Earth around the sun.
A French physicist, Fizeau, shone a light between the teeth of a rapidly rotating toothed wheel. A mirror more than 5 miles away reflected the beam back through the same gap between the teeth of the wheel. There were over a hundred teeth in the wheel. The wheel rotated at hundreds of times a second; therefore a fraction of a second was easy to measure.
By varying the speed of the wheel, it was possible to determine at what speed the wheel was spinning too fast for the light to pass through the gap between the teeth, to the mirror, and then back through the same gap. He knew how far the light traveled and the time it took. By dividing that distance by the time, he got the speed of light. Fizeau measured the speed of light to be 313,300 Km/s.
Another French physicist, Leon Foucault, used a similar method to Fizeau. He shone a light to a rotating mirror, then it bounced back to a remote fixed mirror and then back to the first rotating mirror. But because the first mirror was rotating, the light from the rotating mirror finally bounced back at an angle slightly different from the angle it initially hit the mirror with. By measuring this angle, it was possible to measure the speed of the light.
Foucault continually increased the accuracy of this method over the years. His final measurement in 1862 determined that light traveled at 299,796 Km/s.
Today: 299792.458 km/s
Source Materials: Wikipedia 2011
Light
by Ben Trefethen
In 1667, Galileo Galilei tried to determine the speed of light.
He and an assistant each had lamps which could be covered and uncovered Galileo would uncover his lamp, and as soon as his assistant saw the light he would uncover his. By measuring time that it took for the light to pass between him and his assistant and knowing the distance Galileo reasoned he should be able to determine the speed of the light. His conclusion was that light traveled If not instantaneous then extraordinarily rapid"
In 1675, the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer noticed, while observing Jupiter's moons, that the times of the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter seemed to depend on the relative positions of Jupiter and Earth. If Earth was close to Jupiter, the orbits of her moons appeared to speed up. If Earth was farther away from Jupiter, they seemed to slow down. Reasoning that the moons orbital velocities should not be affected by their separation, he deduced that the apparent difference must be due to the extra time for light to travel when Earth was more distant from Jupiter. Using the commonly accepted value for the diameter of the Earth's orbit, he came to the conclusion that light must have traveled at 200,000 Km/s.
In 1728 James Bradley, an English physicist, estimated the speed of light in vacuum to be around 301,000 km/s. He used stellar aberration to calculate the speed of light. Stellar aberration causes the apparent position of stars to change due to the motion of Earth around the sun.
A French physicist, Fizeau, shone a light between the teeth of a rapidly rotating toothed wheel. A mirror more than 5 miles away reflected the beam back through the same gap between the teeth of the wheel. There were over a hundred teeth in the wheel. The wheel rotated at hundreds of times a second; therefore a fraction of a second was easy to measure.
By varying the speed of the wheel, it was possible to determine at what speed the wheel was spinning too fast for the light to pass through the gap between the teeth, to the mirror, and then back through the same gap. He knew how far the light traveled and the time it took. By dividing that distance by the time, he got the speed of light. Fizeau measured the speed of light to be 313,300 Km/s.
Another French physicist, Leon Foucault, used a similar method to Fizeau. He shone a light to a rotating mirror, then it bounced back to a remote fixed mirror and then back to the first rotating mirror. But because the first mirror was rotating, the light from the rotating mirror finally bounced back at an angle slightly different from the angle it initially hit the mirror with. By measuring this angle, it was possible to measure the speed of the light.
Foucault continually increased the accuracy of this method over the years. His final measurement in 1862 determined that light traveled at 299,796 Km/s.
Today: 299792.458 km/s
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The New School Cooperative Project
The Coconut Milk Run
Yesterday the kids and I reviewed a basic set of skills needed to achieve an upper middle class income level here in America. The list included:
BW Media
Please see the new School project at www.pacificrally.blogspot.com
Yesterday the kids and I reviewed a basic set of skills needed to achieve an upper middle class income level here in America. The list included:
- Soft Skills
- Public Speaking
- Reading
- Writing
- The ability to plan and hold meetings
- Event Organization
- Sales skills
- Foreign Language skills
- The ability to recognize a need and develop a plan to fulfill that need.
- Intelligence
- Technical - computer or higher tech
- Financial
- Leadership
- Historical
- Social & Social Networking
- Mathamatical
When asked where he would like to start Stevie chose the Event Planning. We brainstormed for an hour before coming up with the idea to plan a virtual sailing rally fashioned after the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. This one would play host to over 200 boats travelling from Panama to New Zealand on the Coconut Milk Run.
They will be developing blogs to discuss such wide topics as fleet logistics, weather routing, safety at sea seminars, equipment training, micro event planning including; hula dance lessons and meeting with locals at each island visited. There is virtually no end to the possible options they have. Particularly when you consider this all live prep for a real Milk Run Voyage aboard the Omarsea.
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