Hail!!

I was heading home from a birthday party when it was thunder, lightening and hail! We knew it was coming, especially on the dog walk when the wind got really chilly suddenly and huge dark clouds moved in.

It wasn't until 11pm that the storm hit- just in time for me to be driving home. I had the good luck (?) of hitting the same storm twice-- I outran it driving home and then it hit once I got home!

I've never had that experience. I'm fairly sure that it was the same storm because each time it had the same characteristic two one-minute-long "pulses" of hail associated with it. I'm pretty terrified of lightening storms and I'm glad that we don't get them too often.

Another California harvest

Another batch of goodies for helping other people out. A lab-mate does research on artichoke thistle and I headed out today to help her measure her plants. On the edge of her plots, she has planted border rows, which are normally to ensure that there are no "edge effects" on the growth of the study plants. Since her artichoke thistles are related, and may be partially descended from feral crop, she has planted border rows of horticultural varieties all of the same species. These include globe artichoke, and cardoon. Lucky for us, some of the flowers are early!

She said that it's rare to have artichoke and asparagus at the same time.

We're just about to steam them. Mmmm.

The avocados and star fruit were just a random bonus from other projects. Often folks need to plant a large amount to take only a few samples, and have way too many to use, but too few to sell.

Cheers to that!

One picture to get us all by...

A bloom in an unlikely place is always uplifting.
Like this flower I saw in Death Valley (Geraea canescens).

I think I need this flower to get me through this week. Such power!

On a lighter note

Fractals in flowers and fields

Consider what this picture has in common with the next two.

"The term ‘fractal’ (from the Latin fractus, meaning ‘broken’), introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot about
25 years ago, is used to characterize spatial and/or temporal phenomena that are continuous but not
differentiable. Geometrically, a fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided
into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole...
"Fractal properties include self-similarity or affinity, scale symmetry, scale independence or invariance,
heterogeneity, complexity, and infinite length or detail...
"Fractal theory offers methods for describing the inherent irregularity of natural objects. In fractal analysis, the Euclidean concept of ‘length’ is viewed as a process. This process is characterized by a constant parameter D known as the fractal (or fractional) dimension."

Li, Bai-Lian. 2002. "Fractal dimensions"in Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. Abdel H. El-Shaarawi and Walter W. Piegorsch, eds. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester,Volume 2, pp 821–825

These are concepts that I'm learning and just beginning to understand. Heterogeneity here appears somewhat self-similar, although ecological patterns are often actually scale co-variant. For your consideration.

Next post will not include more flowers, I promise!

California bouquet

It's a flower explosion right now in the sage scrub! Here are some of the flowers I picked nearby in the park.

Lunar eclipse...d by clouds

I can't believe that I didn't know about the lunar eclipse tonight! My nerd-by-association hubby actually told me when I got home.

It was visible for a few minutes before the clouds came in. When it popped out again, I was ready with my camera, with no card. When I came back out 1 minute later, it was gone again, and hasn't returned since.

Thus all we could do was participate in the scene simultaneously playing out in various languages all over the western hemisphere: reminding ourselves of the nuts-and-bolts of an eclipse by acting it out, with a motorcycle helmet (as Earth), and two fists, as, of course, sun and moon. "Non, non, regardes... la lune, c'est ici, et la terre, c'est la-bas!"

So here's my picture of what ... ok, scratch that thought. My pictures of the clouds weren't that good.

I'm sure that SpaceWeather has some good photos.

I promise not to take clear skies for granted anymore!