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Hobby: Biology

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labMost of my work has involved genetic manipulation of safe strains of e. coli and running mini-preps for sequencing.

Since I live next to a River and Puget Sound, I have been taking regular water samples in the area for dissolved oxygen, pH etc. and cataloging phytoplankton.  My main interest is in isolating phages that target these plankton and building a meta-genomic profile of them as a baseline.  Between the rapid acidification of this part of Puget Sound, the fresh water of the river and the viruses brought by the sea lions that have migrated here to catch salmon I’m pretty sure the profile will be changing over the next decade.  The reason I’m using phages is because the small size of their RNA and even smaller areas that aren’t highly conserved make them good candidates for mutations under the stresses of the environment.

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Hobby: Shakyou

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Shakyou is the zen meditation practice of writing the sutras out by hand.  For me, the meditation includes the feel and smell of grinding the ink and the feel of the limited interaction of brush with paper as I recite the sutra.

I spent the summer of 2shakyou007 building the floor lamps, altar, collection box and seiza tables you see here for the use in the Buddhist Church of Spokane, Washington.

I bought ink suzuri stones, brushes, paper and other supplies for 18 seats and made fancy wooden boxes for each set.

When people entered, they were greeted with a warm, damp cloth to wipe their hands and face with and to sit by a hako niwa.

Each participant then picked their supplies from a table and sat down in a chair or on a zabuton to begin their meditation.shizuri_bako

Because this was done in a lunch area, the fluorescent overhead lamps and paraphernalia around the area were distractions.  I purchased table lamps for the tables and made traditional Japanese lamps for the seiza tables and turned off the overhead lights.

On the far right of the picture you can see a hanging curtain with the symbol for this church.  These were screen printed in gold on moleskin fabric and hung on rolling coat hangers. There was a wall of 6 alternating black and white curtains-on-rollers that walled this space off from the greeting area and the kitchen storage that was visible next to the space.

The carpets and runners I brought from home finished the space and completely converted the space from a lunch room into a magical space for meditation.

Hobby: Optics

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I only worked on optical systems that others had designed at Subaru Telescope, but while there I met Dr. Stephen Pompea of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.  He had worked with Nishimura San of Subaru when they were both at U of Arizona and “Nishi” was always kind enough to take me along when he visited with other scientists from the mainland.

Dr. Pompea has always been an evangelist for teaching optics to pre-high school youth and in 2003 he got an NSF grant for “Hands-on optics” which gave teaching materials to grade school teachers in optics.  I was invited to participate in the inaugural class held at USC in 2003 and was able to teach it to a few of the home-schooled kids in Spokane, Washington.

The class provided a large notebook and a wide range of projects for us to teach with, but I went beyond the materials provided and built optical rails, and other “toys” for kids to take home to play with.

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Hobby: Holography

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In the early 1960s Holography emerged as one of the most exotic uses of the unique light produced by lasers.  By the early 1970s it began to make the transition from scientist only to hobbyist.  At first it was to exploit it as an artistic medium but the amateurs that saw its potential quickly developed innovations of media and techniques that became main-stream.

By the mid 1990s the nascent “World Wide Web” had one or two Usenet newsgroups called alt.holography dedicated to the hobby.  Between this and a couple of “how-to” books published by the 1970s superstars of the San Francisco Holography Art movement everyone had access to the technology.

The hardware came available with affordable Kodak holography plates and the surplus lasers from copy machines made the hobby approachable to interested amateurs.  holo1

My holography table was built from the aft bulkhead of a 747 from Boeing Surplus which is a two-inch high honey-comb sandwiched between two aluminum sheets.  I added padding and bricks and placed it in my basement.

In the configuration seen in the pictures it is making a reflection hologram of some plaster whales.  One beam illuminates the whales, while the other illuminates the plate at the far right.

As yholo2ou can see, this is all stuff hacked together from scraps.

 

 

 

Hobby: Rocketry

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The 1990’s was a wonderful time to be a hobbyist.

The contagious optimism of that time lent itself well to the enthusiasms of people and families [ 😦  mostly men and mostly white] who bonded in far flung disciplines that had always been the purview of “trained professionals”.

One of the hobbies that decade “launched” was high power rocketry.  There were always two reactions the first time anyone ever saw a launch of anything bigger than the “Estes”rockets you could buy at any hobby store:  Awe and fear that you could do more than take someone’s eye out.  To assuage such fears, the hobby community itself, the US rocketsFederal Aviation Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms provided strict regulations around the storage, purchase and use of any rocket motors with a specific impulse above 36 Lb-seconds.  In order to better assure that the hobbyist would align with these regulations, hobbyists associations coordinate the launches and supply amateurs with the supplies and training they need.

In 1996 I passed my level 1 certification and my level 2 in 1997.  In order to be certified to level 3 (allowing launch of rockets with a specific impulse exceeding 1,150 Lb-seconds) it was traditional to build something novel into the design.  In those days before cell phones and micro-power electronics the favorite was altimeter-based parachute deployment.

EricalchMine was a pic-based system with a clunky altimeter and an enormous T-1 accelerometer but what I really wanted to study was what’s called the mach disks of the rocket’s exhaust.  This is actually a phenomena that reveals volumes about the sonics, plasma and nozzles of all jet and rocket propulsion.

 

 

 

Interrogating Light

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Other than purely theoretical astronomy, all astronomy depends on some kind of light (electromagnetic wave).

Among ancients the most they could do was determine the position of stars accurately and relate their position to the rotation of the earth.

Today, one of the most valuable instruments for really getting information about the star itself,  is the spectroscope.

How broad the spectral lines are, any shift in their position and the patterns of emission and absorption lines all tell us about the star.

To get practical experience in how valuable this is, I had the youth group of the Spokane Astronomical Society build spectroscopes using the Mac and Cheese boxes common in 2002.  We also had access to some grating material from my employer at the time.  The only  other supplies needed were some thick black paper and some black photographer’s tape for the slit and grating ends of the box.

I created a worksheet which used the grating equation to figure out what angle the spectrum would appear at relative to the slit on the other side of the box.  To test the results of our computations, we held a red laser (633nm)  one mac-&-cheese-box-length away from a white board and marked where the light fell.  Then we passed it through the grating onto a white board and marked where that light fell. Then we measured the distance between the two.

The design looked like this:

 

spectro1

I created several light sources to see the different spectra possible and provided this chart to classify what gasses were in those sources.

spectrum