I tested out a new partner in the Valley this weekend. He climbs well, better than me. But a silent guy.

Adam traversing to the chains on Ejesta (5.8) on Reed’s Pinnacle:

We mostly climbed in the 5.8-10ish range doing some routes on Reed’s, Five & Dime, and the Apron.

This year so far has been a washout for climbing. From shoulder surgery in January to a lack of quality partners in the spring and the summer, I haven’t accomplished any of my climbing goals for the year. But it is good to climb hard again. With some exceptions, if my body isn’t aching by Sunday evening than the weekend has been wasted.

Via Hiker Hell I found a report of a Rock Empire Cam Failure.

I like Rock Empire cams, they remind me of older WC Friends. Mostly I have the equivalent to BD #4,5 and have found the cams to work very well. Hopefully this is an isolated incident.

Watch this video if you want to know how not to lead climb (make sure you click on the high quality version):

WTF? This guy is sketching out, has plenty of opportunities for protection and still fucks himself up. In the fall you see one or two of his placements pop out above the pillar. Oddly, his rack seems to consist entirely of passive pro such as hexes and nuts. If you’re climbing near your limit you shouldn’t go cheap with a rack. Hexes are much more difficult to place securely in Yosemite granite than a set of Friends or C4s. Worse, this fellow got off lucky. The rope behind his ankle (bad mistake!!) means he flipped over. Without a helmet he could have easily busted his skull on top of a broken ankle. On top of this the leader’s stupid belayer is telling him to go for it rather than insert pro. What assholes.

This supertopo thread has two interesting photos of Dana’s Couloir in 1907 and in August 2008. The retreat of the glacier is amazing. Right now glaciers in the Sierra are basically in full retreat. I’m curious to see how broken the Palisade glacier is right now.

A while back I posted on a GSI experiment that found electron capture in 142-Pr and 140-Pm followed a non-exponential decay law given by:
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Two other groups have looked for this oscillating decay curve and haven’t found it. The GSI response seems to be the environment in a storage ring is different than what is found in the other experiments. If you embed the nuclei in a material you somehow restrict the phase space which changes how the nuclei decay. Or something.

Today I saw this weird paper that finds an oscillation in the decay of 32-Si and 226-Ra that correlates with the sun-earth distance. It is really weird when you consider their two examples; 32-Si decays by -decay–a weak interaction process–while 226-Ra decays via -decay–where alpha-particles tunnel through the nuclear barrier. Basically there is no known physical process that could influence the decay curve and lead to a seasonal variation.

The authors state:

Although there are hundreds of potentially useful nuclides whose half-lives have been measured, the data from many of the experiments we examined were generally not useful, most often because data were not acquired continuously over sufficiently long time periods.

I’m not sure why they didn’t verify the 32-Si and 226-Ra examples before posting the paper. It would be easy to do and would make a good undergraduate project. Take a standard source such as 60-Co and/or 137-Cs and use a germanium or NaI detector to count the decays every other week for a year. One could do the same with a silicon detector and a standard -source.

Ug. The future of nuclear physics lies outside the US. Today I saw a talk on nuclear astrophysics and the future FAIR facility at GSI in Germany. It is beautifull what a science friendly government can do!

Construction of FAIR starts this year. The future of a radioactive beam facility in the US is still uncertain as well as medium energy nuclear labs such as JLab. Perhaps I ought to dust off my German textbooks?

Woah.

I ran into Caldwell and Sjong in May while walking through the Manure Pile Buttress parking lot after we climbed Nutcracker. Didn’t have a chance to ask what they were up to but I was really curious.

So this weekend I picked up a secondhand EF 70-200mm f/4L lens from someone upgrading to the IS f/2.8 version. I took my camera with my when I visited L.’s friends farm and took about 250 shots.

Unfortunately, most pictures were garbage since I the UV filter that came with the lens is very smudged up. Most pics taken with the UV filter on have a very soft focus and were poorly exposed. I’m not sure how to clean the UV filter–maybe wash it with methanol and then air dry it?

These pics also had the ISO cranked needlessly to 1600. Ug.

Thursday night L. and I drove over the Tioga Pass to hike up Mt. Banner and Ritter. The weather was discouraging so we decided to drive to Death Valley instead.

In Death Valley we tried to visit the Saline Valley. I pushed my 2WD Saturn up the Saline Valley road but the road’s condition was such that a 4WD was needed. After twenty miles up the road a large puddle discouraged further progress. So we spent a nice night camping next to the road, drove out the next morning, and climbed Wildrose Peak.

This was my first time visiting Death Valley National Park. The openness and barrenness of the landscape appeals strongly to me–as desert landscapes often do. It was disappointing to not be able to explore the canyons, old mines, and dunes while we were there.

We visited many hot springs on the eastern side. Here are two photographs of the Travertine Hot Springs near Bridgeport. L. and I were lucky enough to enjoy the hot springs by ourselves:

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L. and I are going to the east side of the Sierra for the next four days. L. has never been up to the High Sierra so I wanted to take her up Mt. Ritter and Banner but the weather looks like it is going to be crap. Maybe Death Valley? Who knows, we’ll play it as the conditions allow. My plan is to focus on photography rather than the hiking.