Two buildings to go and then Central Green will be done

Visual echoes of a demolished school and one that still stands are to be found in the Central Green project, Kelowna city councillors heard Monday.

The brick-forward architecture of the housing development mirrors some features of the original Kelowna Secondary School, which once stood on the property, and Central School on the other side of Richter Street, city planners say.

“The use of brick is a key material tha’s been in play with all the buildings in a modern way at Central Green,” said planner Terry Barton.

Council approved the form and character permit for the last two Central Green buildings, sixstorey structures that will flank the site's northern edge along Highway 97.

When the final two buildings are completed, Central Green will have 748 homes compared to the 717 that were envisioned when plans for the site were drawn up more than 10 years ago.

After the original KSS, the Okanagan’s largest school, was knocked down to clear the site for development, the property sat vacant for many years before the city sold it to Stober Group in 2016 for $6 million.

“The big win here was to get people living in the downtown area,” Coun. Luke Stack said. “This fulfils the vision we had of downtown residential living.”

The city’s deal with Stober

Group specified the number of units that were to be built and there were initial plans for buildings of up to 20 storeys. But the developer said towers were not practical, and the site is a collection of low- and medium-rise buildings.

Also, there is much less commercial and office space than was originally outlined.

City planners Terry Barton and Ryan Smith said the lack of office space was not much of a concern.

“I don’t think these things ever turn out exactly as we thought they would,” Smith said.

Some councillors lamented changes to Central Green’s original vision.

When we look at the sky on a clear night, far from city lights, we see blackness, speckled with a few thousand stars, and the silvery smear of the Milky Way.

Its peaceful tranquillity is deceptive, because there is a lot of highenergy stuff going on. To really see it, we need to look at other wavelengths.

Light is an electromagnetic wave; so are ultraviolet, infrared, radio, X-ray and gamma ray emissions. The only difference between them is their wavelength.

Radio waves are the longest: kilometres to a millimetre or so.

Infrared waves have lengths ranging from a millimetre to maybe 400 nm (“nm” is short for nanometre, which is a billionth of a metre).

The electromagnetic waves we can see, which we call “visible light” have lengths between about 800 nm (red) to 400 nm (blue).

Then we get to ultraviolet (400-10 nm) then Xrays (10 -0.01 nm).

Waves with smaller wavelengths are called gamma rays.

Electromagnetic waves come in indivisible packets called quanta.

The shorter the wavelength, the more energy contained in that quantum. To produce quanta of a given wavelength means the appropriate amount of energy needs to be available.

Making gamma rays requires extreme amounts of energy. Making something “gamma ray hot” requires temperatures of billions of degrees.

These may occur in exploding giant stars, but most cosmic gamma rays are not produced by heat.

An example of a source of “non-thermal” gamma rays is a lump of radioactive material, like radium.

The atoms of such substances are highly unstable, and tend to disintegrate into smaller atoms, a process called nuclear fission. This releases a lot of energy, with some of it in the form of gamma rays. Since producing gamma rays requires large amounts of energy, they provide a powerful tool for studying the high-energy universe.

Gamma rays damage cells and destroy living tissue, so it is fortunate that incoming cosmic rays are blocked by our planet’s atmosphere. This means that to observe them, we need to put our “gamma ray telescopes’ in space.

The latest of these, the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008, is the latest of a series of orbiting gamma ray observatories.

The gamma ray sky shows a bright band coinciding with the Milky Way, and a sprinkling of many starlike sources scattered over the sky. Some shine more or less steadily; some vary in brightness over time. Others appear for a few days or so and vanish. Then there are some that flash on for a few milliseconds to seconds, and then vanish.

The moon glows dimly in gamma rays, due to it being bombarded with cosmic rays, highenergy particles pervading our galaxy.

We think the gamma ray glow from the Milky Way is produced by cosmic rays. When these smash into dust grains or quanta of ultraviolet radiation, they generate quanta of gamma rays.

Exploding giant stars can produce gamma rays by non-thermal, nuclear processes. Occasionally we see some in solar flares. A particularly interesting case arises when there are two stars closely orbiting each other. One of the stars has aged to the point where it is a white dwarf.

Then, as the other star gets old, it starts to swell, entering its own pre-white-dwarf stage, This leads to its older partner pulling that material down onto its surface.

This accumulates until a critical mass has accumulated, and it all explodes as a sort of super-sized hydrogen bomb, giving off a burst of gamma rays.

Most galaxies have black holes in the middle. Some have really massive black holes. When they pull in a particularly large mouthful of material, they produce floods of gamma rays.

Gamma rays reveal a dynamic, exotic view of the universe. However, since we enjoy those dark, clear, tranquil skies, it is a good thing we can't see them.

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Mars is high in the south just after dark. The moon will be new on Thursday.

The last year has been challenging for social butterflies, as the COVID-19 pandemic has limited opportunities to socialize in person with close friends and family members.

Social distancing guidelines affected various holidays throughout 2020.

Valentine’s Day may be the easiest holiday to celebrate while still adhering to social distancing restrictions. After all, Valentine’s Day is typically a day to spend time alone with the person you love.

The following are social distant Valentine’s Day celebration ideas.

1. Order a take-out dinn two from a favourite local restaurant. It gives you th night off from cooking an helps support a small bus

2. Watch a romantic mo your preferred streaming service.

3. Treat each other to a cozy pajamas and spend t under the covers catching