Masks

With the pandemic coming, and knowing the effectiveness and importance of masks, I got busy making top quality re-usable ones around the end of March. These are made from top quality fabrics and offered in a standard 2-layer version and high-performance 3-layer masks. They are available for purchase here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/254577982386

After numerous experiments, I determined that pure cotton muslin is the most comfortable inner liner and this is used on all my masks. Attractive outer designs of high density cotton are available in various styles. Ear bands are comfortable 1/4-inch elastic. All materials are pre-shrunk.

Masks are equipped with a 6-inch wide padded annealed copper nose wire to conform the mask to the shape of your nose and face. This stops leakage and fogging of eyeglasses, and improves filtration effectiveness.

High-performance masks include a third inner layer that serves as an electrostatic filter. These masks deliver 97 to 98 percent filtration efficiency on particles as small as 10 nanometers.

The science behind it and test results are published by the American Chemical Society here:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252

There are about 30 designs and more are added to the eBay listing every few days. The most recent additions are hand-sewn Italian, Guatemalan, and Pan-African masks.

Please take a look.

Bird Database on Hold

Well, I’m stuck. I have the whole problem worked out for how to implement this efficiently, but I can’t proceed. The efficient solution can be thought of as a matrix math problem. However, the scripting languages available to me are PHP, Python, Ruby, and Perl, none of which are suited to this kind of problem.  It could be done but it would be clumsy and inefficient. A language like C would be ideal for this but that’s not available. So, I’m looking for another solution.

Bird Database

There’s something I’ve had in mind for Maya Paradise for 20 years and I’m finally doing it. Maya Paradise has always had, since 1997, a directory of bird species that can be found in Rio Dulce. I’ve always wanted to create a searchable database and bird identification tool.

There are bird identification tools on the Internet, but still, in 2019, none of them are very good, in my opinion. I can understand why this is so. Creating what I have in mind isn’t easy. No matter where I live, I’m always watching birds, wanting to identify them, and usually failing because the tools on the net just don’t do the job. I hope to remedy that.

I have a basic structure and database system built and running, but there’s a huge amount of work to do to complete it. We’ll see how this goes.

More Updates

Updates continue. The cellular phone code page, which was popular for years, was obsolete and has been removed. The Tropical Diseases page has been updated and dead links removed. The Privacy Policy has been updated.

It’s a shame that so many good things that were on the Internet years ago have disappeared. Maya Paradise is a bit unusual in that it’s been up for 22 years. Often, you can find things that have disappeared on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.  If you like what they do, please donate. I volunteer work on the Archiving Team. We recently archived all of Google Plus. It was a crash program and we managed to capture 1,800 terabytes of data (yes, you read that right), or 98 percent of all G+ accounts before Google shut it down.

I was recently on a project with a friend to restore an antique radio from the 1920s. A lot of information was posted on the net in the past but our research was hampered because most of it had disappeared. People host photos on photo hosting services that then go bankrupt and the material is gone. Nearly every link we ran into was dead. Since we’re both engineers, we sussed it all out from scratch and I wrote it up here: The Radiola 20 – A Restoration.   I hope it will be around for a while.

Progress is being made on Maya Paradise, little by little. Finally got the new site map finished and submitted to the Google search engine. It contains 1,900 pages.

 

 

Tropical Weather Now Updated

After upgrading the tide tables, the next important thing that needed review was the Caribbean Weather Page, here: https://mayaparaiso.com/weather.php

The page looks like it did before but the content has changed. New technologies are available today. The old GOES-EAST satellite was taken out of service and replaced with GOES-16, but is still called GOES-EAST. This satellite is a marvel of technology, delivering jaw-dropping imagery at 7000×7000 resolution in visible light and every IR band. Two of the most useful images are shown on the page, and a link is provided if you want to explore all the things that this satellite can do.

Excess info has been removed. Boaters in Rio Dulce don’t care what the temperature is in Caracas. I used to show ordinary weather forecasts for various cities in Guatemala, which was a leftover from when I did the radio nets. That’s been removed and replaced with the weather forecast for Fronteras.

Rather than cluttering the web page with more notes, I’ll write a legend for each item displayed on the weather page and some background in another blog post.

Enjoy!

All Tides are Updated

I am pleased to announce that the Maya Paradise tide tables are now fully updated.  Time and level for all tides, including those occasional days with five tides are shown for the following locations:

Rio Dulce Entrance / Livingston, Guatemala, 15.8333° N, 88.8167° W

Isla Guanaja, Honduras, 16.4833° N, 85.9000° W

Port Royal, Isla de Roatan, Honduras, 16.4000° N, 86.3333° W

Puerto Cortes, Honduras, 15.8333° N, 87.9500° W

Puerto Castilla, Honduras, 16.0000° N, 86.0333° W

Belize City, Belize, 17.5000° N, 88.1833° W

Punta Gorda, Belize, 16.1000° N, 88.8167° W

Sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and moon phase are also calculated for the above locations.

Please note that times are shown in local time, Central American Standard Time, not UTC as before. Levels are in feet.

Tides are accurately calculated for the year 2019 through the year 2040 for all locations except Punta Gorda. The harmonic elements and constants for Punta Gorda are not good enough to calculate past 2036.

Happy Sailing!

Maya Paradise Tide Tables

Tides

Renovation and upgrades to the Maya Paradise web site are underway. The most urgent thing needing attention is the tide tables. All the obsolete data has been removed and a new page structure put in place.

The Rio Dulce Entrance tide tables for 2019 are up. Tables for the other locations covered on Maya Paradise are in progress. Thank you for your patience.