211. pre-HSB

Living with the animals...

I needed a Peet's interlude, so after my mid-afternoon shower I walked back downtown to the Market Street Peet's. I walked in behind a streetperson/crazy I quickly identified by the bright blue Ross (Dress For Less) store cart he was dragging behind him. I was afraid I was going to be in line with him, so I wasn't sad (or really surprised) to see him veer off toward the bathrooms where there was a substantial waiting line. But this is where it gets worth writing about.

Imagine you were really desperate for a toilet, or simply sociopathic and didn't care about other people. Regardless of your need or your ruthlessness, you would have to time your arrival just right to be able to jump the line and walk directly into a bathroom. This guy did just that. Someone was coming out just as he walked up and he bolted in -- leaving his Ross cart behind.

The poor Peet's staff tried to get him to come out, but you know how well that worked. I wasn't waiting in the line, but I'm pretty sure I would have been as impressed by the guys timing even if I had been. But my question is, How do you end up a crazy street person when you have that kind of luck?

An atypical week

Not only am I working weekdays, instead of my usual weekends, but I worked three straight days with a double shift (two, four hour shifts) on the middle day. Three shifts were at Oracle OpenWorld here at Moscone Center. (The reason I signed up for this was to see how they were going to manage working around the construction zone in the middle of the convention center. It was blocked off with a green wall -- not a living wall, but a wall covered in what looked like AstroTurf. The area was constrained but people who hadn't been here before wouldn't even notice.) 

So I spent three hours each day standing on the carpet in the sun showing people where to put their trash. 

Then last evening I also worked "Taste of Temescal" in Oakland -- a nice little neighborhood event where a bunch of restaurants serve food on the sidewalk and we put out our eco-stations to collect the resulting trash. The event was easy to work, the only problem was that it was spread out over more than ten blocks. We sorted all the trash and hauled it back to a truck near the middle of the area. There were only two of us, which made me nervous, but it worked out fine. It's amazing what two good people can accomplish -- and equally amazing how more useless people can do so little.  

The event audience was annoying. An odd combination of dense and patronizing. Maybe it was because I was always in a hurry since we had so much space to cover. 

And this whole week all of us "greeners" are mostly just getting ready for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, which is looming on the horizon. Today I did laundry so I have all the clothing options for this weekend. At least I will be in control of what I'm wearing (clothes and gloves and hats) because I have no control over the changes going on at the event, which I already know will be extensive. I tried to sort out some things online, but haven't heard anything back since Saturday -- I'm expecting lots of "fresh hell" when I arrive Friday, late morning.

The most fun viewing at Oracle today was the sniffer dogs. There were three of them, two yellow Labs and one Black, and one of the Yellows was younger and got excited when he saw the others. He had to be calmed down. The Yellow female was very well behaved. 

It still looks like the weather will be perfect this weekend -- not a cloud in the sky and in the 70s F -- though I think there's going to be less shade in my area than in the past so it's going to feel hotter. I'm reviewing my hydration plans. Already stocked up on enough electrolyte water for the weekend. (I'm glad I just checked the forecast again, now they are predicting tomorrow will be the warmest day at 75 with it dropping down to 69 on Sunday. This is good news.)

Also, John Prine (another of my favorites) will precede Emmylou Harris on the Banjo stage at the end of the day Sunday. I would have preferred their being spaced out more, so I could move closer to the stage for both sets, but I'm hoping I will be able to hear Prine from the area where I will be working. 

Astrophysics

Since I had lots of time on my hands while working Oracle, my mental subject was the observable universe. Thinking about the universe on this scale is as mind boggling as thinking about reality on the quantum scale. The most distant galaxies we can see are composed of stars consisting almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, and they are over 13 billion light years away (and the universe is less than 14 billion years old.)

These early galaxies exist (as I understand it) in every direction we can look, so that we know the universe was a big place even then, and that we are not on an edge of that universe. We also know, based on the redshift of the photons coming from these early stars, that space is expanding in all directions. There's a way of describing space as being like a ball of bread dough with raisins distributed throughout the dough, that is intended to help us understand the concept of expanding space. As the bread bakes, it rises and the distance between the raisins gets greater. This works fine when you think of bread dough when you can see it all rising together at the same time. But with the universe that isn't the case.

We see those distant, early galaxies not as they are now but as they were 13 billion+ years ago. As the photons reaching us passed from there to here they passed through space that was more and more expanded. The center is now baked bread -- to continue with the metaphor -- but the surface of the ball that we can see is still cool dough. (In fact, we calculate the current location of the most distant stars as over 40 billion light years away, but we will never see what's happening at that distance now. And that would be true even if we lived for 40+ billion years, as the continued expansion of space means the light from those regions will never ever reach us.)

But, with all this, what I have trouble with is the expansion of space at the center of the ball we are looking at -- which is really just our observable universe, not the universe as a whole, since we have no idea how big that is and we never will know.

Talking about time on this scale is even worse that talking about geological time. I don't know, off hand, if life will be seared off Earth by the Sun before or after parts of today's observable universe start disappearing. But, let's say that stage of the expansion of the universe precedes major changes to the structure of our Sun. How strange it will be to know you are seeing a galaxy -- maybe with a spectacular quasar at it's heart -- for the last time. Will the news media report this the way they report the passing of rock stars? Or maybe like they report the passing of much lesser celebrities. 

Will we rage against the dying of these lights?