Color Scheme

I don't understand why the tile and rug colors look true, but the paint chips are so washed out.

Fashion Revolution?

Today is the 2-year anniversary of the collapse of Rana Plaza, a building in Bangladesh where thousands of garment makers worked and died. Has anything really changed in two years?

Will wearing our clothes inside out, as Fashion Revolution urges, make any difference?

I really don't know.

I know that my shopping habits have not changed in the last two years--but mainly because I had already changed it about 10 years ago.  Read my stuff diet and wardrobe refashion threads to review the evolution of my habits and thinking.

I'm going to spend a quiet evening at home, making myself a new shirt from a thrifted t-shirt and some scraps I purchased from an LA odd-jobber (waste from a garment factory).  I liked Iris' shirt so much, I decided to make one for myself.

I already cut it out. The pieces on the left will be used in the shirt.  The small scraps at the top will be used to test stitch tension and then tossed in the trash afterwards.

Shams posted a photo of how she uses those small scraps and a light bulb went off in my head.  The medium-small scraps to the right were cut into pieces about 2/3 the size of paper towels.  I keep a basket of them under both the kitchen and bathroom sinks and use them instead of paper towels for messy cleanups.  (I use reusable rags for most of my cleaning jobs.)

As you can see, I do not run a zero-waste home.  But things get used and reused and then tossed.

Double rainbow light show

I saw a double rainbow on the evening of April 21.  The stoplight wasn't red long enough for me to frame the picture with both arcs.  Try to imagine a faint secondary rainbow to the right.

The picture has so many layers of meaning.  Rainbows are a light phenomena.  Then there is the traffic light.  And the red light camera.  You can't tell from the picture, but I was driving southbound on Broadway, right outside the Department of Commerce labs in Boulder.  Those labs are famous for their light (laser) experiments.

When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, a professor told me to go to CU Boulder instead of MIT.  He had postdoc'd in Boulder and he extolled the advantages of high altitude for scientific productivity.

Spectroscopists usually make measurements under vacuum (relative to ambient air pressure).  Labs at high altitude get a head start on the ambient air pressure.

OK, that is not that much of an advantage with a good roughing pump.

The real advantage is the dryness of high altitude.  Water is a sticky molecule and it sticks to every surface of your apparatus.  Then it off-gases as the air pressure descends in the vacuum chamber.  Then it keeps off-gassing...  You can speed up the process by "baking" the chamber with a heat blanket as you pump it out.  But, it can take a whole day to get the water vapor level in a chamber low enough not to interfere with your signal to noise.

My former Berkeley professor said that those days add up to a whole lot of productivity when averaged over the years.  He thought that a spectroscopist's publication count should by handicapped like golf for the time spent pumping out water vapor.  ;-)

And you thought that Boulder has 3 national labs (NCAR, NOAA and NIST) because scientists have a high affinity for alpine recreation.  It's the lack of water vapor.  Really.

Did you read the scientific explanation Amanda Curtis' QUADRUPLE  rainbow photo?