December 18, 2019 Morning

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Good morning! Happy Save the Pine Bush Dinner Day! 😋 It should as always be a good dinner at the Westminster Presbyterian Church downtown at 6 PM. It’s also Bake Cookies Day 🍪! Cookies are good but I don’t believe in having them at home because they’re unhealthy and unnecessary expense. I do sometimes have them at camp or at parties, they’re great when they’re fresh out of a camp oven. Next Wednesday is Christmas 🎅. I do find that a bit hard to believe, but honestly I’m more excited about the following Saturday and heading out to the Finger Lakes to camp.🏕 Clear and sunny, bright around 27 degrees in Delmar, NY. 🌞 There is a west-southwest breeze at 6 mph. 🍃. There are 4 inches of fresh and very white snow on the ground. ☃ Made for a rather bright walk down to the express bus, almost wish I had sunglasses. 😎 Going to be a cold one the next few days — tThings will start to thaw out at Sunday around noontime but I’m hoping the sun and wind will help melt things away even when its below freezing. 🌡️

It was a bit of an icy walk down to the express bus 🚍 but I left in plenty of time to get there in time ⌚. The sidewalks weren’t bad but they were a bit slippery in parts. I ended up walking on the shoulder the last bit so I wasn’t slip sliding my way all the way down there, as I wouldn’t want to slip and walking in the snow is annoying. So bright though with the sun and gleaming sun — it seems dark in contrast on the bus.☀ While it’s going to be cold today, I’m hoping with the sun and the wind, and some salt the sidewalks will be good by tomorrow although it might be too cold to walk down to the express tomorrow. That said, they’re have been negative 15 days when I’ve walked down to the express bus int he past. Winter is here, for a little while, but I expect a warm up by next week with the latest forecast.♨

Today will have a chance of snow showers, mainly after noon. Some of the snow squalls could be heavy at times, leading to white out conditions and very dangerous travel conditions. Weatherman says check the radar before you get on the expressway. Clear going this morning into work, and hopefully it won’t impact my commute home after the Pine Bush Dinner. Mostly cloudy 🌦, with a high of 31 degrees at 12pm. Four degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical Southwest wind 6 to 15 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph. Chance of precipitation is 50%. Total daytime snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. A year ago, we had mostly sunny skies in the morning with some clearing in the afternoon. The high last year was 30 degrees. The record high of 60 was set in 1921. 17 inches of snow fell back in 1887.❄

The sun will set at 4:23 pm with dusk around 4:55 pm, which is 20 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At sunset, watch out for snow squalls  🌨 and falling temperatures around 27 degrees. The wind chill around sunset will be 15. ☃️ There will be a west-northwest breeze at 15 mph with gusts up to 25mph. Today will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daytime, a decrease of 18 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will have a chance of snow showers, mainly before 11pm. Mostly cloudy 🌧, with a low of 5 degrees at 5am. 15 degrees below normal. Maximum wind chill around -8 at 2am; Northwest wind around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph. Chilly night ahead, I left the heat turned up a bit so it won’t be too cold. Chance of precipitation is 30%. New snow accumulation of less than a half inch possible. In 2018, we had mostly clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 16 degrees. The record low of -13 occurred back in 1973.

Project SCORE, the world’s first communications satellite, is launched today in 1958. 📡 Still an important communication technology, although the lag between sending and receiving, and the limits on bandwidth mean that for most communications people use fiber optics these days. I guess some rural households use satellite dishes for television reception and internet, but from what I’ve heard it’s hardly ideal due to the long lags in the signal. 📶

It looks like the weekend has improved somewhat in recent forecasts, especially on the second half of the weekend. 🌤 Saturday, mostly cloudy, with a high near 28. Sunday, mostly sunny, with a high near 37. Typical average high for the weekend is 34 degrees.

So as I noted last night, I’m planning on staying in town this weekend. I want to get that voltage switch set up, and I don’t know how busy I will be Saturday after the Pine Bush Hike 🚶🌲🌲🌳 for some filming for the Reszin Adams.📽 It’s going to still be fairly cold, and the following weekend looks increasingly nice, if it’s not too cloudy and muddy. Might actually have some rain a week from Friday, followed by several days above freezing, which could be problematic, in the sense that the woods might turn all to mud.

I think I will mount the voltage switch in the back next to the inverter and tap power off the the line that goes up to the USB charging ports I have back there, as I have both positive and negative there to tap into easily. 🔘 From there I will run the positive output of the voltage switch to a diode to protect the voltage switch from any induced current spikes when the relay closes. 🔄 While I’m not sure if this is totally necessary, a few years back I tried to build a relay position indicator with LEDs, and I kept blowing LEDs out when I would switch it on and off a few times due to current spikes (any magnet will create a reverse electrical spike when current is broken, e.g. inductance). 🧲From the diode, I’ll run an “exciter” line to the switch that currently turns on when the engine is on, and hook another diode between the engine input and output so I don’t back-feed current and accidentally turn on the CB radio and dash cam when the solar panel comes on.

Looking ahead, there are 3 weeks until Bubble Bath Day 🧼 when the sun will be setting at 4:38 pm with dusk at 5:10 pm. On that day in 2019, we had cloudy, mild, rain showers and temperatures between 41 and 29 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 30 degrees. We hit a record high of 60 back in 2008.

Northwood Club Road near Huntley Pond

That Property Down In Coeymans

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albanyweblog.com: That Property Down In Coeymans

Of all the ridiculous messy stinking problems that former mayor Jerry Jennings left current City of Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan to clean up when she took over City Hall, disposing of the three adjacent parcels of land owned by Albany in the Town of Coeymans in the southern part of Albany County has perhaps been the most persistently odorous. Well into her second term, Mayor Sheehan continues to spend way too much time trying to find some way to dispose of this frightful waste of City taxpayer money. Perhaps the mayor’s efforts may finally be heading for a sanitary resolution, unfortunately we can’t yet say for sure.

Now, I don’t want anybody’s eyes to glaze over, so here’s the quick read teal deer version of the history behind this sordid mess. Shortly after taking office as mayor in 1994, Jennings started buying up 363 acres of fallow farmland, woodland and wetlands in Coeymans with City of Albany taxpayer money so that he could plant a gigantic garbage dump that he expected would be enormously profitable. That’s right, a garbage dump. Anticipating those profits, he eventually paid three Coeymans landowners the ridiculous sum of $5.2 million of taxpayer cash for land that was worth maybe, at most, half a million dollars. Maybe. What landowner would refuse such inflated offers? Of course they sold him the land.

All the Species Declared Extinct This Decade

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All the Species Declared Extinct This Decade

Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island tortoises, died in 2012. George’s story is the perfect extinction story. It features a charismatic character with a recognizable face, an obvious villain, and the tireless efforts of naturalists.

The population of the Pinta Island tortoise species was decimated by whalers hunting and eating them during the 19th century. Zoologist József Vágvölgyi discovered George in 1971 and brought him into captivity. No other Pinta Island Tortoises have since been found. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the species extinct in the wild in 1996, while researchers attempted to breed George with other tortoises to at least preserve his genetic material. But George died—of natural causes—sparking news stories about his life and legacy, which media outlets continue to cover to this day.

But George’s story is not a typical story. Perhaps a better mascot of the extinction crisis is Plectostoma sciaphilum; a small snail, called a “microjewel” for its beautiful, intricate shell, that inhabited a single limestone hill in Malaysia. During the 2000s, a cement company wiped the hill off the map for its valuable resources, rendering the “microjewel” snail extinct.