Stamp Mills, Deer, and Astrophysics

How is that for a blog title?  All have happened within last week.

We had a surprise visit from John and Rita from Edmonton who had been rained out in Jasper.  It gave us a chance to go exploring on the Golden Mile Trail near Oliver.  Many places in BC have experienced a gold rush as ore was discovered here and there.  The Golden Mile Trail starts at a vineyard (of course) and travels up a mountainside to get to the old stamp mill built in 1895.

Stamp mills were used to crush rock to then enable the extraction of minerals.  Heaven knows how they managed it, given that rock was delivered down to the site via rail cars, along what I considered a steep slope.  All that is left now is an old stove (complete with many bullet holes at the top) and the walls of the mill.

Fortunately, tastings were available at the winery at the finish.

Later that day as we were lounging around, I look out the window to find a male deer having a lovely rest just about 10 feet from the back of the house.  Maybe he was enjoying the view as much as we do.  He rested there for about 30 minutes before moving on.

Wednesday featured a guided tour to the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, just outside of Penticton.  It was truly mind-boggling.

To start with, the observatory is dedicated to researching radio waves in the universe.  Those signals are extremely faint.  There have been a number of means of catching the waves, starting from the original dish, to an array of wires strung along telephone poles, to a series of smaller dishes linked together, to the new signal catcher called CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment).

The site has a staff of a number of astrophysicists as well as computer scientists, who build the specific computers needed for the calculations.  (The info given to us was that the computers must perform seven quadrillion multiplications per second.  Yikes!)  Canadians have much to be proud of at this site, because some of their computer designs are used world-wide for other observatories.

As an interesting side note, life is a little different at this site.  CHIME is sensitive enough that it could detect a single cell phone floating in space 20 times as far away as the moon.  Thus, all people are required to turn off their cell phones completely, and staff do not use key fobs to lock and open their vehicles.  Any computing done on the site (even printing) is sheltered in metal Faraday cages to prevent interference, and even conference rooms are totally encaged in metal.  It gave us a feeling of going into radio jail.

The full technical story is huge, and is worth googling.