Updates and interviews

This will be fairly short life update, as today I finished the third of three job interviews in the span of less than a week. This is new territory for me, as I've never actually had multiple job applications out like this before, and the stress of preparing for multiple interviews has been rather occupying my mind for the past few weeks. I also managed to miss one of them entirely last week by getting the time difference between California and Hawaii backwards (which certainly didn't help my stress levels!), though thankfully they rescheduled it to today. (Yes, this is a time difference I've been handling routinely for over a decade…including over the International Date Line while I was in Australia…and which I checked online to make sure I had correct…)

I won't go into too much detail about the various jobs since I don't know if any of them will actually pan out, though I do think all three interviews went pretty well. In the order I had the interviews for them, the first job would be the most different from what I'm currently doing but also involve staying in Hilo and be the least disruptive overall. The second would keep me on the island (just not in Hilo) and be closer to what I currently do, while the third would be the closest, but involve moving to California.

All of which makes it rather difficult to choose; I quite like what I do now (full-time software development), but I'd also really like not to have to move. I won't hear back for a few weeks though, so that's a (possible) decision I don't have to make just yet at least. I've been weighing different possibilities and option in my mind for days now, but ultimately I'll just have to wait and see what offers (if any) I get. It's now less than three months until my time with Gemini is up, so whatever happens things will be changing for me in the near future. (I checked, and my last day is officially October 9th.) I suppose, if nothing else, it'll give me some new things to write about! A hui hou!

A late tau day, and some cruise ship photos

First of all, happy belated Tau Day! I remembered to bring it up at work on Friday and forgot to note it here. I'm going to blame the bout of COVID-19 I had last week making me a bit scatter-brained.

Second, two weeks ago I went flying over the bay with the intent of catching a cruise ship leaving in a hyperlapse. I actually managed to pull off a pretty good one, where I got my drone to focus on the ship while executing a sideways move, creating a very dynamic video. However, the experience has also cemented my previous opinion that hyperlapses involving the ocean just fundamentally don't work, at least with the Mini 3 Pro where the fastest interval between frames is two seconds (for reference, that rate compresses fifty seconds' worth of time into each second of the hyperlapse, at 25 fps). Going over land, that frequency isn't a big deal, as the land itself generally isn't moving noticeably so any movement comes from the drone. Over the ocean, though, the surface waves which are so slow and relaxing in real-time become a series of flickering monstrosities when sped up fifty times. It's not something that can be handled by, say, slowing the drone's speed, because it's inherently part of the environment. Perhaps if I can slow it down a bit I'll share it, because it's otherwise a pretty neat clip, but I just don't like how the waves look when sped up that much.

I did take a few normal video clips of the ship as it got out of the harbor and onto the open sea, and while they don't really come together into a cohesive video I at least managed to get some interesting still frames from them that I wanted to share:

I quite like how the ship's silhouette carves into the Sun's reflection.

A top-down view of the pool as I flew over.

Looking back towards shore.

And out towards the open ocean. Full steam ahead!

I've mentioned on this blog that it's been a very rainy winter and spring here in Hilo so far this year, and even now as we get into summer we still have a lot of overcast and rainy days. (I'm not complaining, as it keeps things cooler with the AC out at work.) We have, however, started to have some more sunny and clear days like this one recorded here, and it's been nice to get out and fly again after not flying at all in May. I'm looking forward to doing more flying in the near future, so we'll see what that produces (there's a waterfall I've been wanting to revisit for months now). A hui hou!

Dice, and the towers they roll down

I've been meaning to share this incredible dice tower my friend Graham 3D-printed for me for my birthday for a few weeks now, so let me finally do so:

I realize now I should probably have shown something for scale, but it's a good eight or ten inches tall, and large enough for “normal” sized dice to clatter down the stairs with ease. (I tried getting a photo of them in motion, but they descend so fast that they're just a blur!)

Now while you can use a dice tower for anything that involves rolling dice, as a way of ensuring a good random roll or just for the fun of watching the dice fly down, in this case it was because I finally had a nice set of dice worth rolling. (Very) long time readers of this blog may remember this post from all the way back in 2011, where I (badly) modeled a set of polyhedral dice and mentioned that I'd long admired the amazing designs of polyhedral dice that exist, but never really had a reason to get some of my own. Well, I finally picked up a set a few months ago from Die Hard Dice, which has a lot of really neat options such as this Mythica Copper Aquamarine set that I got:

They're made from a zinc-alloy with an electroplated copper finish, and if, like me, you've only rolled plastic dice in your life they'll feel surprisingly hefty, rolling with a good hearty ‘thunk.’ Not directly on a table top as they'd probably put a good dent in it, which is another purpose of dice towers now that I think about it. (There are also a few additional dice in the set such as a pair of ten-sided dice, but I wanted to focus on the Platonic shapes in this photo.)

The reason I finally got a set of polyhedrals is because a friend I know from board gaming invited me to a game he's running with a rather interesting premise: he's created an original fantasy world where he wants to have various games progress through time, with this particular time period involving small parties scouting out an unknown land mass. I'm one of over a dozen players, with the idea being that people organically form parties together based on what parts of the world they want to explore together (so one group might scout a river glimpsed to the north, while another scouts a ruined city to the east, or magical glaciers to the south). Multiple parties are considered to be running simultaneously over two-week periods in-game (though individual sessions would be spread out and consist of no more than four players each), with the world progressing forward in time after each party has had a chance to go out and explore (and return and share their finding on a large shared map).

It piqued my interest since it hits upon my love of exploration and discovery, and it's been a lot of fun getting to play with different groups of people each time. We're using the Shadowdark rules, which keeps things relatively simple and moving along, and provide pressure and danger when outside of safe areas. (Indeed, my first character was already among the first casualties, when three-fourths of our group got killed in a nighttime encounter; we learned that climbing trees is not a good way to fight hostile humanoid frogs since they can just jump up there with you, then proceed to knock you out of the tree to take falling damage.) I've long been sort of “peripherally aware” of role-playing games and the stories they generate, and I've been having a blast finally getting to experience it in person. We'll see how it develops! A hui hou!

A belated birthday

Another year, another birthday, and I forgot to write my usual birthday blog post! And I'm 35 now, old enough to be president. This past week was a bit topsy-turvy and I even thought about it the night before, and just forgot. It was the annual board meeting at Gemini last week, which meant a number of additional people around, some sessions open to staff (which I mostly listened to in the background on Zoom while getting work done), some meetings with board members interested in talking to the staff, a team meeting for my team since my boss was out in Hilo, and just generally a lot of things out of the ordinary routine which threw me off.

And for added fun, the air conditioning has been out on the second floor (where my office is) for the past two weeks. It gets uncomfortably warm pretty quickly with the windows closed (due to a lot of electronics in the building generating heat), but thankfully the past two weeks have also had somewhat turbulent weather with a bit of breeze, so with the windows open and a fan on me it's not too bad. Hopefully we can get that fixed fairly soon, as we're around the time it transitions from the cooler/rainier winter weather to warmer summer weather. We've had some later-than-usual stormy weather this year (having lost time on the summit from storms this past week), but I imagine it'll start being hot and sunny pretty much any day now. Never a dull birthday here! A hui hou!

A new view of the Wailuku

It's been so rainy for the past few months that I haven't had many chances to put a drone in the air. Last Friday we had an absolute downpour of up to 3 inches per hour for a short time, which caused a pretty widespread power outage including at the Gemini offices. I heard of one person in Piʻihonua whose rain gauge went from empty to 7 inches over the course of the day. A few weeks ago the rain let up long enough for me to get in a flight, and while the lighting isn't the best as it was still overcast I thought the photos I got were interesting enough to share.

I've been vaguely aware that there's a small hydroelectric power station in Hilo on the Wailuku River for some years now (it gets mentioned in the occasional local news article), but didn't actually know where it was located. There's an electrical station next to the river near downtown which I thought was associated with it, but I recently learned that it's actually upstream, outside the city proper above Waiale Falls (in Piʻihonua, actually).

I'm pretty sure that's it in the photo below, given the water coming out (though I don't know where the intake is). It's not very large, which makes sense since the Wailuku, though it reliably flows all year, spends most of its time in a very low flow state that can't be providing that much energy. I found myself more enchanted by the rest of the scene, with the emerald-green grass and the Wailuku rising up the mountain side, a distant waterfall barely glimpsed in the distance. It's quite idyllic…though the invasive Molucca albizia trees growing on the right shore spoil the mood a bit. (They grow faster than native trees and crowd and shade them out, but are pretty fragile and easily drop large branches, making them dangerous during storms.)

Anyway, that's all for now. I just wanted to share a nice photo of a new part of the Wailuku I hadn't really explored before. A hui hou!

A review of “Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names”

It's something of a journalistic cliché that Inuit languages have a very large number of words for snow (at least compared to English). The question of many words exactly isn't very meaningful, however, because in a sense it's comparing apples to oranges. Ultimately, reconstructed Proto-Inuit-Yupik has just three unique root words for types of snow, but Inuit languages, due to being more on the synthetic side of the analytic-synthetic spectrum than English is, can produce a practically unlimited number of words describing snow (or any other topic) in increasing detail. But these wouldn't be analogous to words as we'd think of them in English, but more like descriptive phrases.

While the Inuit may not actually have that many root words for snow, the indigenous Hawaiian people did have many different names for rain. Anyone who's lived in the Hawaiian islands for a while will be familiar with how the varied geography creates microclimates, and will understand how the rain can be very different from place to place, or even in the same place at different times or under different conditions. No surprise, then, that people who depended on the rain for water noticed those patterns and came up with names for different kinds of rain.

Last month I picked up the book Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names, by Collette Leimomi Akana and Kiele Gonzalez. It contains over four hundred painstakingly-compiled names for different rains found in the islands, based on written accounts from the 19th and 20th centuries (including newspapers and letters). It's a pretty hefty book, as you can see below.

At 327 pages, this is not a small book.

The title “hānau ka ua” comes from a birth chant for Queen Emma that goes, “Hānau ke aliʻi, hānau ka ua me ka makani” (“The chiefess was born, the rain and wind, too, were born”). The introduction explains how important reading the weather was to ancient Hawaiians; some rains would be associated with particular seasons, which in turn might let people know that a particular kind of fish was available to catch. Some rains share the same name across islands, while other are tied to a specific location. A place might be known for a single type of rain found there, or it might have multiple rains associated with it; my favorite quote from the introduction is:

One place can have several rains. Hilo is home to at least fifty rains.

(Which, if you're keeping track, means around one-in-eight named rains are associated with Hilo.) The book is fantastic for someone like me with a grounding in (but not a mastery of) Hawaiian language, as it reproduces for each rain the original Hawaiian text where it was mentioned along with an English translation. This combination makes it fantastic for practicing one's Hawaiian reading comprehension, and I keep surprising myself with how much I remember from my year in undergrad.

When I bought this book, I had envisaged it something like a birding guide, a way to identify the many rains of Hilo and start checking them off some mental checklist. In this I have been disappointed, but I want to be very clear that that is not the fault of the book or the authors. It's a bit more depressing than that; you see, most of the references to rain names comes from 19th century writings, and many of them (at least as far as I've gotten in the book, though I see no reason to expect otherwise) are from popular sayings, mele (songs/chants), or other poetic utterances. They're not descriptions of what the rain is like, because the speaker/writer could be confident that the listener/reader would know what they were referring to; they didn't bother describing the rains because people already knew what they meant.

And that's a huge cache of cultural knowledge that has probably been lost to time! I'm not suggesting that everyone in the islands knew every name in the book; probably people knew the rains relevant to where they lived, plus probably some famous ones by reputation from other islands or places around their island. But such knowledge was primarily passed on orally, and with things like the suppression of the Hawaiian language in the late 19th and early 20th century, probably a lot of that knowledge was lost. Which is a real shame.

It's made even worse by the few descriptions of rains that do survive in the book, from things like letters or newspaper reports. I'm going to quote the English translation of one such description here, to give an idea of the specificity and detail that was involved. This is for the Alanilehua rain, which was associated with Hilo, Panaʻewa, and Puna:

Alanilehua Rain. This rain is sometimes called Wailehua. It is associated with the nectar of lehua blossoms. When this rain starts to come from the water's edge at Hāʻena and from above the upper heavens of that place, it will travel to the west, sprinkling the buds of Puna's hīnano blossoms and pouring down over the clusters of Panaʻewa's lehua trees. It won't ever come close to town, but these raindrops will appear outside of the western border of Panaʻewa. Then it turns and circles to the south, ascending the uplands of Pāʻieʻie, and disappearing within the watery mists of the forest. It has a delicate nature, is rarely seen, and is visible only between the hours of 10 and 12 in the morning.

From a description of rains by Lilia H. Richards and company, who traveled to the uplands of Puna in 1876. Hawaiian source: Richards et al. English trans. by author.

I adore this description for how much it says about the observation skills of the people who named it. The last sentence, in particular, really contextualizes it: it is “rarely seen,” and is only visible in a two-hour span, yet people noted it recurring enough times to sense a pattern and give it a name. I love the details of where it comes from, how it doesn't rain within the town but just outside it, and eventually turns and disappears up the slopes of Mauna Loa. It's a sheer delight to read about (especially in the original Hawaiian), and I can only imagine the similar descriptions that people must have shared in centuries past for all the other rains which are now no more than a memory of a name.

Still, I'm still less than halfway through the book at this point, and there are still many names to discover, and hopefully more descriptions that might start letting me put a name to the many rains I encounter here in Hilo (and elsewhere). Hānau ka ua won't necessarily serve as a birder's guide to rain, but it is still precious as a repository of what cultural knowledge remains about rain names, much of it poetic and beautiful in nature. If all that's piqued your interest, you can get a copy from Kamehameha Publishing here. And from an interview with the authors that I read, I'm looking forward to their next project, tentatively titled Hānau ka makani, a book of wind names; apparently they've already collected over six hundred of them. A hui hou!

Reforesting Mauna Kea

Last week I took the opportunity for a new experience: helping plant trees with the Mauna Kea Forest Restoration Project. For background, much of the high-elevation slopes of Mauna Kea was originally upland forest. A lot of that forest was later cleared for grazing cattle or as a result of grazing by invasive ungulate species; I don't know the exact details, but the point is that a lot of former upland forests is now upland grasslands. Montane prairie? (It does tend to remind me of the prairies of Nebraska when I'm up there, and a co-worker mentioned it reminded him of Scotland.) I'm sure there's a term for it.

Anyway, the location this time was the Kaʻohe Restoration Area on the west side of Mauna Kea about 6,000 feet (~1,800 meters) up. The area is part of the habitat range of the endangered palila, of which only a few hundred individuals remain (mostly in the wild, though there's also a captive breeding program). The hope is that, by restoring the forests that originally blanketed the mountain slopes, palila and other various endangered native birds will have more habitat available and able to expand their ranges. The area we were planting in was directly along the highway running between Saddle Road and Waimea, so it'll be easy to spot the trees growing in future while driving by.

Drone view from above Puʻu Ahumoa, a cinder cone up mauka (uphill) of where we were planting.

This time we were planting koa seedlings, a tree in the Acacia genus endemic to Hawaii famed as a hardwood for making canoes, surfboards, and other things (and unusual for being a thornless Acacia). The seedlings were either one or two years old (I think the latter), and already a few feet tall. We started with 800 seedlings, and despite having only about half the number of people who'd signed up we managed to plant 765 of them over the course of about five hours. (And only stopped because we ran out of gas for the portable hole drillers and didn't have a means to manually dig holes!)

My first tree planted!

Interestingly, I learned that koa have “baby” and “mature” leaves, though the mature type are not true leaves, but actually phyllodes – enlarged and flattened petioles (the leaf “stalk”) which take on the function of leaves. The photo below shows one of a few koa that had been planted in the same location last year to test how well they would grow, and shows both types of leaves on the same plant.

A ~3 year-old sapling showing different leaf types.

The weather was also interesting, being clear and sunny throughout the morning before a cloud rolled in over lunch turning everything misty and foggy (which was pretty typical, I learned from people who'd been there for a lot of plantings). Last year's archaeology experience gave me a good idea of how to prepare, though being well above rather than below sea level meant the sun was completely unforgiving. (I missed a patch of sunscreen just below one eye, with the resulting sunburn Wednesday morning looking humorously like I had a black eye.)

Me with seedlings after lunch, to get an idea of the scale.

All in all it was a fun experience, though my knees are still sore a week later from all the up-down-up-down involved. I'd definitely like to go again (after some time to recuperate), though probably not very often as the days it happens are unfortunately mostly during the week (though this occasion was on Prince Kuhio Day, a holiday, so I'll keep an eye out for opportunities). It feels nice to be part of regrowing forests, and knowing that the trees I planted could potentially be seen by people driving by for decades or even centuries to come. We'll see what comes of it in future! A hui hou!

Local sculpture

Two weeks ago I was invited by my friend Ken (whom I've gone on excursions with before) to come along with a local photography club to visit the sculpture garden of a local sculptor, Mike Shewmaker. While I only found out during the visit, I've been passing by one of his sculptures in downtown Hilo for years; it's located near the corner of Kilauea Avenue and Keawe Street, by the Subway. I'd never actually paid much attention to it, but when I saw some of Mike's other work and someone reminded me of the one downtown it instantly clicked.

The sculpture downtown; a plaque mentions that the primary meaning of “hilo” is to braid or twist. 

Mike's sculptures tend towards the abstract primarily, with a number playing on this theme of curving, looping structures seemingly frozen in motion. He was there to meet us and talked about the creation process at some length; interestingly, he designs them in miniature, then has them constructed, and hasn't yet found a design his construction team couldn't handle (even when he was deliberately pushing the limits!).

I quite like this one with the single curly tendril.

Another similar to the one downtown, with some others in the background.

Altogether he has quite a few; with his permission I got the aerial shot below with my drone, and I think I count upwards of forty! Plus the one in Hilo, and he mentioned he has another one going up somewhere in Volcano soon. It was a very interesting visit and chat that lasted over two hours, though the clouds and intermittent light rain made me completely forget about sun protection, resulting in a mild sunburn(!).

Overall it was a fun excursion, and interesting to meet the artist behind a sculpture I go by pretty much every week. Happy Easter! A hui hou!

Electric gas-mileage equivalents

A few days ago I came across a video from a group called Out of Spec Studios who do reviews of various electric vehicles, where did a range test on four electric pickup trucks, the Tesla Cybertruck Cyberbeast, Rivian R1T Dual-Motor Large Pack, Chevy Silverado EV 4WT,  and Ford F-150 Lightning Extended Range. It's a fairly entertaining watch with the editing and personalities involved; they charged each truck up to 100%, then drove them around (simultaneously) on the freeways at 70 miles per hour around Colorado/Wyoming/Nebraska until they ran out of charge to test their range in real-world conditions. (Along with a trailer-mounted diesel generator-powered fast charger for rescuing each one when they ran out of charge!) But what caught my attention was the efficiencies they calculated at the end of the test (and shared up-front in the video, which is pretty awesome).

The efficiencies came out in miles per kilowatt hour (mi/kWh), which I found interesting as I didn't know how to compare it to what I'm more familiar with, miles per gallon (mpg). It turns out there's a value for this, called miles per gallon gasoline equivalent, or MPGe. It's also a very simple conversion: one (U.S.) gallon of gasoline is considered to have 33.7 kWh of energy (though this is only for a theoretical 100% efficient conversion of the chemical potential energy to heat and work; in reality it's always lower). 

The four vehicles tested got 2.0 to 2.6 mi/kWh, which (multiplying by 33.7 hWh/gallon) translates to 67.4 to 87.6 MPGe. My 2018 Nissan Rogue has what I'd consider pretty good gas mileage (despite the hilly terrain of Hilo doing it no favors), and it's only rated at 25 mpg in city driving, or 32 mpg on the highway. (Though it informs me that the last few drives have been closer to 20 mpg, in practice.) That's quite a difference in energy efficiency!

For a different perspective, I looked at comparative costs. By inverting the mileage values and multiplying by the costs of electricity and gasoline, the four electric trucks would theoretically have costs in dollars per mile of $0.19/mile to $0.25/mile (based on the average price of $0.50/kWh for residential electricity). My Rogue, arbitrarily using the cost of gas of $4.88/gallon I saw a few days ago where I usually fill up, would vary from $0.15/mile to $0.18/mile for its highway and city ratings, respectively, so pretty comparable, overall.

I don't have a point to make from all this, I just got curious enough I thought it'd be fun to do some math. Personally, I'd love to have an EV; the allure of being able to charge at home and basically never having to stop at a gas station again is very strong. I didn't get one in 2021 after moving back to Hawaii for a few reasons, primarily the inventory shortage and lack of options at the time, but also the uncertainty in where I would end up living; and since I live in an apartment complex with no place to charge, my Rogue turned out to be for the best for now. It's in good condition and I hope to be able to get plenty more years of use out of it, but hopefully it can also be the last internal-combustion engine vehicle I own. Who knows what the future holds! A hui hou!

Honoliʻi beach at dawn

It's been a busy few weeks here, with several people from my team at work who are normally remote being in town last week for a series of team meetings, socializing, and planning sessions. It was nice to see people in person (and we got a tour of the telescope!), but possibly as a result of all that close contact I came down with a cold on Sunday (which I'm finally mostly over today, thankfully).

However, the week before all that, I drove a short way up the coast around sunrise to Honoliʻi beach, one of the few beaches on this side of the island considered to have any waves worth surfing. It's at the mouth of the Honoliʻi stream, and is one of the relatively rare places along the Hāmākua coast where its usual sea cliffs give way to a beach and have a slope shallow enough to permit walking to the shore. (Honoliʻi means “little valley” in Hawaiian, if you were wondering, which is both descriptive and rather cute.)

Honoliʻi beach and the mouth of the stream.

The morning was bright and clear, and I saw something my housemate Jonathan and I chased several times in vain over a decade ago: a horizon free of clouds for the sunrise! I had begun to think it didn't happen. But the sunlight was dazzling reflecting off the water, which led me to an interesting discovery.

You see, I've got some circularly-polarized lens covers on my drones, one benefit of which is that they block glare from linearly-polarized light reflecting off flat surfaces like water. It partially depends on the angle of the Sun, and while I was conceptually aware of what they did, this flight was the first time I really noticed. With the ocean as smooth as it was, you can see the ocean floor in the image above for quite a ways out from shore. And the water definitely wasn't this transparent to the naked eye by any means, so I was really a bit shocked at how well I could see through it with the filter. Here's another shot from a slightly different angle looking back along the coast towards Hilo; notice how clearly the rocks on the ocean floor are visible near the bottom of the image:

The beach from a different angle.

It was really quite eye-opening, no pun intended. I've always found water too deep to see the bottom of unnerving (one reason I don't spend much time in the ocean), and tend to assume the land drops off quickly. Whereas, from what I could see during this flight, it's actually fairly shallow even a ways from the shore, and slopes down gently. (Which isn't too surprising, given it's a shield volcano with very gentle slope, but our minds fill in assumptions for what we cannot see.)

One last bonus photo, if you follow Honoliʻi stream back from the ocean you come to a nice plunge pool and Makaila falls, surmounted by a bridge carrying the original road up the coast (the current highway uses the bridge seen in the first photo). The name of the falls means “young shoot, as for transplanting,” apparently. It's a lovely, serene place that isn't easily reachable by land. Which I'm beginning to realize is true of many of the waterfalls on the Hāmākua coast, the more I explore with my drone. For every Akaka falls and Rainbow falls, there's another set of falls that can't be easily reached or seen, perhaps not quite as spectacular or breathtaking, but beautiful in its own way. I've started planning out trips based on where I can see falls on Google Maps, trying to find new spectacles to enjoy and share. So you can expect more waterfall photos from me in the future.

Makailo falls.

Having flown up the stream with the Sun at my back lighting the way, I had a bit of a nasty surprise when I tried to turn around and return: the Sun was still so low in the sky that it was shining almost directly down the valley, and the backlighting of leaves and lens flare made it a dicey proposition to try to fly back out. Fortunately, this was actually my second time flying around Makailo falls (the first was back in July of ʻ22 when I stopped near the bridge in the photo), and I knew the pool itself had a clear view of the sky. Combined with the Mini 3 Pro's ability to look upwards better than a lot of drones, I was able to fly straight up out of the jungle and safely back above the trees. All's well that ends well, as they say! A hui hou! And happy leap year!