The Other Two Buck Chuck

Trader Joes in Redding had this label over their $1.99/lb hamburger. Get it? Two dollars per pound = two bucks for ground chuck. These people are good.

Regular Trader Joe shoppers know that "Two Buck Chuck" is the Charles Shaw wine which they sell for $1.99 so this play on words is cute and fits right in with the whole store's theme.

This is not a place one goes to for dish soap ___ I tried just to be sure and no luck. Nor mundane margarines. It's more a shopping experience where there is huge selection of good stuff at good prices. Popular lines and each pricing, not per pound.

I inquired if Weed was in their expansion plans but the manager just chuckled. Maybe he thought I meant the product.

Bom Jesus, the "Diamond Ship"

(Excerpted from the October '09 National Geographic.)

This is a story that I will remember for a very long time. Five hundred years ago wealthy Portuguese merchants were outfitting ships to sail on a fifteen month voyage to the East Indies on the route pioneered by Vasco De Gama in 1497. The riches sought were spices and the monies to pay for them included Spanish excelentes and portugueses, with the coat of arms of King Joao III. But also there were copper ingots, a staggering 22 tons of them, in the shape of a half-cannon ball with the trident hallmark of Anton Fugger, one of Renaissance Europe's wealthiest financiers.

Fast forward to April of last year at one of the world's most jealously guarded diamond mines on the coast of Namibia, De Beer's Sperrgebiet ("forbidden zone" in German). A mine engineer finds one of the ingots and immediately halts operations around the cordoned-off find.

Which is no small thing because this riverbed site contains one of the most intense concentrations of high grade diamonds in the world. Washed down to the Atlantic from sites as far as 1,700 miles inland by the Orange River, only the hardest, best quality diamonds make it to this spot, some weighing hundreds of carats. The strong northerly current scattered this lode for miles northward along the coase of Namibia.

Only a few Portuguese East Indiamen or "naus" have been professionally excavated by archaeologists. Most have been plundered by treasure hunters so this is an extra-ordinary find but very difficult to research. In November of 1755 a massive earthquake and tsunami washed the Casa da India, the vast Lisbon archive of maps, shipping records, and charts into the Tagus River.

Without these printed records the researchers had to work backward from clues found on the wreck and one of the most helpful was the rare portugueses of King Joao III. They were minted only from 1525 to 1538 then recalled, melted down, and never re-issued. Their presence onboard along with the copper ingots indicated the vessel was on its outward passage to India rather than returning during this 13 year window.

Eventually researchers learned that the Bom Jesus was brand new and owned by the king himself when it departed Lisbon on 7 March 1533 with 300 souls on board. Reconstructing the story from surviving snippets of information about the fleet historians learned that it was struck and scattered by a huge storm just before the eastward turn around the Cape of Good Hope. Breaking up and drifting north the Bom Jesus eventually grounded 150 yards offshore just 16 miles north of the Orange River.

No one knows what happened to the survivors, if there were any. Local experts say the storms are sometimes so severe that getting ashore is impossible. Yet there are calm days too, and it's possible especially since no human remains were found at the site, that much or even most of the crew made it. If so they must have been desolated by the grim desert environment and the knowledge that rescue was never going to come. Still, the area was visited seasonally by the hunter gatherers we now call Bushmen and they may have helped those who lived through the wreck. But the story ends there. No trace of them remains in the written record.

The exquisite irony of the fabulously wealthy ship owned by a king crashing on a famously rich diamond mine is not lost on the projects researchers. The tale is compelling and a gold-framed window on the past.

100% Chance of Rain

Don't you love it? "100% CHANCE"?? I mean, 100% is a done deal isn't it? THERE WILL BE RAIN. This is now on my favorite oxymoron list, right up there with political decency, civil war, and all that.

But speaking of weather, there is a great weather website that has no ads, it's the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration and the adress is www.wrh.noaa.gov. You can put in any location but you can also bookmark our area so that when you want a week's forecast, you get it right away. There is probably a way to put this on your desktop too, but I haven't got that far yet.

There are a great many features in this site, such as forecast discussion which is the meteorologist's narrative of what is coming our way. The text has special terms in boldface which means you can click on them and get a definition. "Trough" for example means an elongated low pressure area not associated with a circulating low pressure system which typically brings a "front", another definition.

We find this site particularly helpful with winter coming on because we can enter a destination or waypoint and see what we're getting into. Then we cross-check www.dot.ca.gov/dist2 which is Siskiyou County to get the Cal Trans road conditions.

This site gives not only chain requirements but you can also view the roadway from their remote cameras which is very helpful if you are headed to Medford and going over the Siskiyous because there is a camera at Hilt and one at the summit.

Of course all of us in Lake Shastina also benefit from "The Wall". This is an orographic (look that one up) 'curtain' which forms at the upper end of the Sacramento River canyon roughly between Mt. Shasta and Weed. I checked the precip records once and this is how I recall them: Dunsmuir had 54+ inches, Mt. Shasta 36", Weed 26, and Shastina 16. The moisture fell to the ground as it rose up the canyon.

As residents of the Shasta Valley know, one can clearly see a weather wall to our south when a storm is in progress . . . it may be raining or snowing like crazy in Weed and points south while we might experience wind and partly cloudy skies.

This is one of the biggest reasons we moved here. After 33+ years in Mt. Shasta we got REAL tired of drifted snow so deep we could not even get to work some days. We found the almost-snowless conditions of Lake Shastina particularly appealing after shoveling our roof in 2001 for the third consecutive year.

So yes, we had a 50-year snow storm a couple years ago of a foot or so but I'll take the wind any day.

Heliostats and Other Solar Stuff

(Excerpts from "Plugging Into The Sun", Sept. National Geographic)

120 quadrillion watts of sunlight are constantly hitting the Earth, that is 6,000 times what we use and it eclipses (excuse the pun) the power generation potential of all other renewable energy sources like wind, hydro, tidal, and geothermal. For perspective, we generated 19,000 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2006. One terawatt-hour = 1,000 gigawatt-hours = 1 billion kilowatt-hours and one kilowatt-hour keeps a 100 watt light bulb glowing for 10 hours. 975,000 terawatt-hours could be generated using just the renewable energy worldwide, 51 times what actually we use.

Because of this government subsidies for solar power are very high, especially in Europe which leads the world in solar technology. This is especially true in Spain where, outside Seville Abendoa Solar's PS10 vast array of mirrors aim sunlight at a "power tower" to make steam for the generating plant's turbine.

Solar One near Las Vegas uses a similar approach for what engineers call solar thermal generation (versus photo-voltaic panels or PV for short). Long rows of curved mirrors called parabolic troughs focus the sun's heat on an oil-filled pipe that runs the length of each row. The hot oil is then run through a heat exchanger to again turn water into steam for the turbine.

Andasol 1 & 2, another Spanish solar installation on the plains of Andalusia use molten salt to store some of the heat generated during the daytime in order to continue boiling water for up to 7-1/2 hours after the sun goes down.

Germany is pioneering an economic incentive called a "feed-in tariff" to drive solar energy research. Anybody who installs a photo-voltaic system on their home can sell their surplus energy to the grid for a guaranteed above-market price for 20 years. That comes out to about an 8% return on investment.

At the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems outside Freiburg the next generation of PV research uses Fresnel lenses (like the ones used in lighthouses) to concentrate sunlight 500 times, raising the efficiency of a standard PV panel as high as 23%.

Solar panels are getting thinner and even bendable, allowing their use on more and more structural shapes. PV is less efficient than solar thermal though (the record panel so far converts sunlight at 40.8% capacity and it costs $10,000; average PV efficiency runs 10% to 20%), and storage has been a problem. Germany and Alabama however have been using compressed air for decades to store surplus daytime energy by pumping it into underground caverns and releasing it at night to spin the turbines.

PV has two big advantages over thermal solar energy; it can be placed at the point of use eliminating costly transmission facilities and it has no moving parts, just solar photons knocking electrons off of silicon atoms and generating a current. So if efficiency can be raised and effective storage designed PV might win out. One line of research is aiming for liquid PV if you can imagine . . . paint your house with it and switch on the power.

And MIT researcher Daniel Nocera has discovered a cheap, self-renewing catalyst which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen which are then stored in a fuel cell for nighttime use. According to Nocera the PV panels on your home's roof which power your home during the day generate enough surplus energy to drive this system with enough left over to sell on the grid. He claims your home can become a power plant on its own.