US National Weather Service Salt Lake City Utah - Satellite Imagery of Smoke over Western US - 2020 Aug 21

California Fires – Late August, 2020

A large number of fires were started by lightning strikes in California over the weekend of August 15-16, 2020. They resulted from a storm system that moved along the coast of California and produced copious amounts of dry lightning through primarily northern California around the greater San Fransisco Bay area. I’m including a number of articles, imagery and videos to document the resulting series of fires and the impact the resulting smoke has had on the upper western United States.

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Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan - Credit: Richard Morgenstein

An Animating Spirit

When Ed Catmull earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1974, with a thesis on three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics, he applied for jobs in academia. He did not get a single one. His academic interests eventually led him to co-found Pixar Animation Studios, create the breakthrough 1995 animated film Toy Story, and receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2019 A.M. Turing Award, along with his colleague Pat Hanrahan.

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