chiefoperator

100 Years Ago: 29-Aug-1913

chiefoperator — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 03:42:29 GMT

You’ve probably familiar with August, 1914… You may even have read the book of the same name, or the other famous one, “The Guns of August”. As we draw closer to the centennial anniversary of those times, I find myself wondering what life looked like to people 100 years ago…

In August, 1913, radio and airplanes were new, and there were no such things as television, computers, or jet engines. Electrons had only been identified as particles 16 years before. Woodrow Wilson was President (the 28^th), and the Panama Canal was almost done. Many countries were still ruled by monarchs; that was still pretty much the norm. (Tsar Nicholas II in Russia and Kaiser WIlhelm II in Germany.)

Many high-ranking officers of the British Royal Navy were still men who had started their careers on wooden sailing ships with muzzle-loading guns, even if the new ships of the day were steel, powered with steam. And 100 years ago yesterday, the Imperial Japanese Navy battlecruiser “Kongo” put to sea from Portsmouth, England for the first time, bound for her home in Japan -- 36,000 tons, and 8 12-inch guns, top speed 30 knots.

She would ultimately have a long and notorious career, before being sunk by a torpedo from a submarine 31 years later… but at the time she put to sea, nobody would have known any of that. She was bright and shiny and no doubt magnificent; the lead ship of her class, and one of the mightiest warships in existence on that day; and nobody knew what would happen...

Mr. Brownie is gone to The Bridge

chiefoperator — Tue, 07 May 2013 01:14:07 GMT

Brownie the pig lived with us for four years, with his two brothers. He was good pig, and we loved him dearly, and when he got sick, we did the best we could for him, but of course in the end we lost him anyway.

The three of them were litter-mates, so they were really all the same age, but by behavior, you'd always have pegged him as the youngest. He wasn't the very, very best-behaved pig ever; he had a touch of the mischievous; he was actually very well-named. But aside from a little sniping with his brothers, he never hurt a soul. (OK, there was that one time he bit me, but I richly, richly had it coming -- did you know guinea pig teeth are SHARP?)

He was devastatingly cute; we used to joke that he could use the "power of cuteness" to make us give him more treats, or hypnotize us into forgetting that we were about to trim his claws or whatever. He was Abyssinian, so a lot of his hair was in tufty swirls, and on his cheeks he had little swirls of white (against chocolate brown) that looked just like little moustaches; it gave him a dashing air. And he had a notch on one ear-flap, where one of his brothers nicked him when he was young.

Pigs will squeak and chirp and wheek, depending on their moods -- some more than others. Mr. Brownie was never an especially vocal pig, but he had a noise he would make when he was chugging around investigating things: kind of a low-pitched chirp he'd make over and over, kind of "bork-bork-bork". He would make it when he was moving, and then stop when he stopped to sniff or nibble something, and then start up again when he moved on, almost like it was just the sound that his engine made when his wheels were turning.

He was never extremely cuddly, and didn't especially like to be petted or stroked, but we snuggled together many a chilly winter night: me on the couch, and him tucked into my armpit, between my t-shirt and my over-shirt, snoozing...

He was sick for a long time. It started with bladder stones, but as time went on, there were more and more medications: for pain, for infection, for his digestion, for his eye. He bore it all, with pretty good grace, for a little piglet: they come to trust us, and seem to understand that we're trying to help, even when they don't like what we're doing very much. He did get so used to being flipped on his back, to have various bits poked and prodded, that sometimes when we were done, he'd just lay there for a while, belly-side-up, in the crook of your arm, as though he were just relaxing, like a furry little man on a chaise-lounge.

He had good days and bad days; there were days he didn't do much but sleep, and other times he would putter around looking pretty cheerful -- attacking a tasty bunch of vegetables, or gnawing on paper balls or parts of his cardboard house.

Somehow, though, as we struggled on, he kept losing weight, and his various other systems seemed to go out of whack, and it was more and more of a struggle to get him to eat enough and drink enough, and more and more medications layered on top of each other, and it didn't really help. We did everything we could; our vets did everything they could; Mr. Brownie did everything HE could. The last couple of nights, I slept on the living room floor next to him so that he wouldn't be alone. Finally, he just got to the point where he wouldn't eat or drink at all, and it was clearly his time.

I wish I could explain better who he was and what he meant to me... He was a quirky, opinionated, fur-ball little spark of life. He was "his own pig", and he'd never let you forget it... But of course, I can't really capture it, the way he was to us.

He was a dear, sweet creature, and now he's... gone. And I miss him; I miss him so.

Literary Tidbit...

chiefoperator — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 01:26:37 GMT

"At Dawn We Slept", published in 1981, was primarily based on 37 year's worth of investigation by Gordon Prange into the attack on Pearl Harbor, although ultimately completed by his colleagues after his death. At the time of the attack, the commander of the US fleet at anchor was Admiral Husband E. Kimmel; afterward, Kimmel was accused of dereliction of duty, but responded by claiming that Washington withheld vital information from him.

In the concluding chapter, "The Verdict of History", Prange et al review all of the arguments regarding Kimmel's degree of responsibility, and ultimately summarize their verdict in the following words:

"For years, Kimmel had worked, planned, and studied with one end in view: When and if war came, he would be on the bridge of his flagship speeding to engage the enemy. So he did not recognize the voice of opportunity when it murmured in his ear, "This is your hour," for that hour demanded of him that for the moment, he cease polishing the sword and pick up the shield. He lacked the perception to read the meaning of the warnings and events of those last ten days before the disaster and the flexibility to adjust his orientation from training to defense."

Things That Concern Me (in no particular order) #1: Rick Perry

chiefoperator — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:50:22 GMT

Not believing in Global Warming is one thing; I can imagine an intelligent person who isn't convinced (but avoids polluting anyway, hopefully, just because it's the right thing to do).

Rick Perry, though, claims that it's a theory that was manufactured by data manipulation, and portrays it as something that more and more scientists are abandoning -- which is of course wildly out of whack with what reputable sources indicate.

Two aspects of this disturb me -- beyond the obvious, that he might wind up leading the country, and continue telling people this twisted version of the facts, and making executive decisions on that basis.

For one thing, it's the product of an overall attitude of distrust toward science and scientists that strikes me as deeply ominous. For another, I suspect that it's almost entirely self-serving; "My career and my fortune will prosper if I profess to disbelieve in X; guess what? I disbelieve in X." I guess the truth goes by the wayside if your meal-ticket is threatened...

Not actually a Mastercard ad...

chiefoperator — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:20:36 GMT

Asics Gel Kayano running shoes: $135.00
Tights, socks, hat, gloves, and other gear: about $200.00
Magic Brooks running jacket, that keeps you warm in wind,
rain, and snow, while weighing absolutely nothing: $95.00
Very patient wife who waits for you: Sorry, no idea how I wound
up so lucky...
4,870 miles on the road training: "Free", if you want to call it that
4 packets of disgusting, sticky, revolting, indispensable GU energy gel: $8.00
...
Finally finished the route you've been beating your head against -- all 22.8 miles of it -- priceless.

Book Recommendation...

chiefoperator — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:27:18 GMT

...If you're into that sort of thing, I recommend Robert K. Massie's "Dreadnought", a study of the naval arms race between Germany and Britain in the run-up to WWI. He's a biographer, not an engineer, so there's more personal profile thumbnails than hard engineering stats, but it's a fascinating book none the less. One gets a sense of how much the phrases "Industrial Revolution" and "Arms Race" have been watered down through over-use, so that they no longer give a fair sense of the anxiety and turbulence generated by the real thing. Compared to the long evolution of the wooden sailing naval vessel, the change-over to turbine-driven, all-steel, turret-gunned battleships was almost meteoric...

BTW, although it's a great book, I don't need to own it forever, and my copy is now up for grabs.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

chiefoperator — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:45:28 GMT

I. Do. Not. Get. People.

I had a conversation today, while waiting for a bus, with a woman who is a neighbor, and with whom I have chatted before and found friendly and reasonable. Today, we were talking about the weather, and the snow, and how odd it was. I know a lot of the people I talk to from day to day are not walking around with Global Warming Anxiety, the way I am, but, when I made reference to the fact that we might be beyond the point of being able to avert catastrophe, the conversation went something like this:

Me: ...so, who knows; in 20 years, we may well be all paddling around in rubber boats, wondering what happened.
Her: Well, I won't be here in 20 years, so it's not like it really matters.
Me: (after a pause) Well, but... surely it's got to matter some? What we leave behind?
Her: Nope! I deliberately didn't have kids, so whatever happens, I'm off the hook!
Me: (after another, longer pause) But... How would it be if everybody thought like that, that it didn't matter what happened to anybody else, after they were gone? Surely, some people... Child molesters... Robbers... How would it be to tell them it doesn't matter what they did to anybody, once they're dead?
Her: (after a pause of her own) I try not to think about things too hard. I just take one day at a time.

Now, I'm probably not recalling the conversation properly... And I didn't put my side of it especially well... And she may really be a perfectly nice woman, or I may have misunderstood, but if you have any moral obligation to your fellow human beings, that burden lies on you NOW, doesn't it?? Even if the impact wouldn't be felt by them until after your death? Can people really, really not see that?!?!?!

Conversations like that make me sad. Especially the part about "I try not to think too hard..."

Contemplating Happiness and Unhappiness

chiefoperator — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:02:39 GMT

I've found recently that my thinking vis-a-vis happiness is evolving...

The mysterious character of happiness has irked me for years -- the way it's possible to be happy in the middle of a catastrophe, or miserable in the midst of calm and plenty -- and I thought of it as an issue of understanding happiness. (I used to often quip that I was sure there were hermits living in caves who were happier than I was.)

A wise woman once defined happiness to me as "accepting where you are", and I think there's a lot to that -- but it also opens the door on a problem with happiness: when people are too accepting of their present condition, does this leave us with insufficient incentive to work for changes that would actually be worthwhile?

I started to think of it like particles in physics: sometimes they have forces on them, sometimes they don't. When a particle has no net force on it, it doesn't move; when there's a net force, it moves in that direction. (Particles have it easy; humans are forever worrying that they're not where they're "supposed to be"; particles are always where they're supposed to be. Even when something bumps them toward a new location, they're not really "supposed" to be already at the new location -- they're supposed to be right on the trajectory to it...)

Is unhappiness a better guide than happiness? They're always saying, in football, that they learn more from the games they lose...

Of course, philosophical musings like this can turn around and bite you; there I was, getting ready to go running, this morning, finding my shoes and so on. I wasn't really in the mood for it; in fact, I was distinctly unenthused. And I'm thinking to myself, "I'm not very happy, just at the moment, you know..." and a snarky little voice answered back: "Unhappiness is a better guide than happiness..." ("Shut up" I answered back.)

Ice where it doesn't belong...

chiefoperator — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 03:50:06 GMT

...So, I went out running today. 26 degrees; crazy, right? Actually, it wasn't bad. I have a new running jacket from Brooks, which is just totally cool. It weighs just about nothing, but it keeps you really warm -- if you keep moving. I went 11.9 miles in 114'13", which is far from superb, but at this point in the season, I'm just trying to keep putting in the miles and I'm not really worrying about times.

Now, I know you lose water even when it's cold out -- heavens I know it; all my gear comes back wet. I've learned to keep drinking from my waterbottle as I run on a distance that long, even though the water gets so darned cold.

But today was a new one... When I got back to the house and started taking stuff off, I felt something odd on the back of my neck, and it was ICE. Mind you this was before the snow started or anything; as cold as it was outside, at least it had been totally dry weather. This ice was from sweat that had been hot enough to sweat out of my head and run down my hair, and then before it could drip off or evaporate it FROZE INTO ICE.

Maybe I need a new hobby...

(At least I figured out how to keep my eyeballs from freezing, which was my problem last week: the trick is to close them for a few seconds every once in a while when the route is flat and straight... Keeps them warm, sort of.)

Odd Thought in re Condensation...

chiefoperator — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 18:06:24 GMT

So, if you have a closed box with some water in it at a certain temperature, any liquid water will evaporate until the vapor pressure is reached - trying to maintain equilibrium. Once the partial pressure of water vapor reaches the equilibrium vapor pressure, if we have an open container of water in the box, even though some water molecules will evaporate from the liquid, an equal number will recondense, and there's no net evaporation.

If you raise the temperature of just the pot of liquid water, more will evaporate, increasing the pressure beyond the equilibrium, and some of the water will condense out on the walls of the box. If we cool the pot, vapor will condense out from the atmosphere of the box onto the sides of the pot, the same way it does on an iced drink on a humid summer day.

But the surface of the liquid is also cold, and we know water molecules hit there and condense all the time, only now the rate of evaporation doesn't keep up with it any more.. Does this mean that on a humid summer day, there's water condensing out of the air in the room INTO my iced tea??

Iraq: Irreconcilable Differences...

chiefoperator — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:33:33 GMT

...SO I was listening to something on NPR about the latest bombings in Iraq; apparently there were 4 car bombings up north, in villages of some tribe or group particularly friendly to the US. They believe the fact that these folks were friendly to us drew the hostile attention -- just like all those times people shot at and tried to blow up the police and military units friendly to us and working with us, etc.

And it got me thinking... Our government isn't ever going to support a government in Iraq that isn't modeled along lines WE think are right, or that isn't friendly to US. Stands to reason, right? Go in, take over, find some dudes who'll do what we want, put them in charge. So we have constraints on what we'll allow as far as a permanent government in Iraq to exist.

But THEY have constraints too; many of them don't seem to like us very much, and lots of the don't seem to see a lot of appeal in political institutions structured along the lines that Western culture dictates. And those constraints matter: it seems to be pretty hard to ram a government down the throats of an indigenous people and think that it will stick very long after you go home, if they don't buy into it.

Now in math, if you pile on too many constraints, pretty soon you find that there's no solution. It may be that that's what were facing; it may be that there will never be a permanent stable government in Iraq as long as we're in charge, because there won't ever be a government that meets the requirements on both sides.

A Moral Hypothesis...

chiefoperator — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:19:35 GMT

So, I have this... concept, this... principle, that came to me once upon a time, and (naturally, being mine) I rather like it:

"Harm no other living thing except in need."

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I tend to refer to this as the "Prime Directive". As fond as I am of this principle, I am certainly sensitive to the question: can it be justified? Obviously, nobody should expect anybody else to accept a moral principle simply because it's catchy.

Can it be justified, or at least supported? Well, morality has an awkward tendency to be subjective and fluid (see note below), but I believe a plausibility argument in its support can be sketched out – based primarily on three steps.

HARM TO LIVING THINGS AS THE FUNDAMENTAL MORAL ISSUE:
Our moral system is a kind of instruction set that guides our actions, and in particular the part of our rules or principles that extend beyond self-interest, practicality and survival. But when we consider the scope of the rules that we consider morality, do we not find that they are all in fact related to the potential for harming some other living thing? Perhaps our moral system focuses on humans, or extends to includes animals but not plants; no matter. If our universe included no living things, we would not need a moral system: if we go to smash a rock into bits, there is no basis for assigning a moral value to the act; we might as well be improving its situation as harming it. It is only when the impact on living organisms becomes a factor that the consequences of our actions assume a moral dimension. So it is perhaps reasonable that a fundamental principle of morality address the broad question of harming living things.

REFRAINING FROM HARM AS THE DEFAULT:
What is to be our "default" position on the harming of living things? Either harming living things is allowable except where specifically forbidden, or it is disallowed except where specified.

I probably cannot defend the choice absolutely, but I feel there is reasonable basis for assuming the latter. Consider the fact that our perspective on moral situations can change, either as a result of new information, or because we have refined our thinking; in addition, there are others who may judge us by their own moral systems, and their opinions and perspectives may even lead us to change our own thinking.

Which is preferable, if we are uncertain or unclear: to do harm, and later revise our thinking and wish we hadn't, or to refrain from doing harm, and later realize that it would have been acceptable? From a moral perspective, I think it is reasonable to choose refraining from harm as our default.

NEED AS THE PRIMARY BASIS FOR JUSTIFICATION:
When can we justify harming another living thing? Let us suppose that we have been called to account for an action, and consider the kinds of reason, justification, or rationalization that might be presented; some of those lines of argument will incorporate need, and others will not.

Again, I am in territory that I feel sounds relatively sound but that I don't see a way to prove rigorously, but I propose to you this: need is a legitimate basis for a "prima facie defense"; we are entitled to have needs, and we are entitled to try to fulfill them and to try to survive. If we suggest that our action was based on need, the judge and jury, whoever they are, may feel that our need was not adequate to justify our act, or that our logic was flawed, but need is typically a sound starting point for a justification.

On the other hand, how can we justify any harm to any other living thing without need? Regardless of who gave us permission or why we thought it was acceptable, does it not automatically become barely tenable to justify a harmful act that isn't based on need? "I strangled the kitten because I just felt like it, and after all, it's not against the law..." (Without delving too deeply here, need I point out that, simply because something has not be made illegal, it is still easily possible for it to be immoral?) Basically, without need, we are hard pressed to create a justification or a defense.

So I think that on the whole, the "Prime Directive" actually does a reasonable job of encapsulating the fundamental scope of morality (discussing harm to living things), the basic default approach (avoid harm), and the primary basis for exceptions from the default (need). And I therefore find myself coming back again to:

"Harm no other living thing except in need."

Note: Why say morality is subjective and fluid? This seems highly undesirable, opening the door to moral relativism; don't we want people ultimately to be more moral rather than less?

One of the huge problems with morality has always been what to use as a bedrock to set it on. To my eye, no attempt yet to anchor a moral system to either a religious doctrine, "natural law", or overpowering logic, has been truly successful: there are always people who have different religions, construe natural law differently, or disagree with the logic.

Ultimately, moral argument seems to wind up being about persuasion – unlike physics or mathematics, there are no rigid proofs or conclusive experiments.

In fact, a multitude of possible moral systems can be conceived – not all equally good, of course, but potentially a large number that are pretty viable – but they will have different properties. How does one choose between the several possibilities?

The problem with moral systems is that, without having chosen one, we do not have it to use as the basis for selecting a morality; we cannot choose one moral system over another because one is "good" and another is "bad".

We must make the decision based on some other criteria, and that's where there would seem to be unlimited grounds for argument and subjective choice; ultimately, I can argue that a moral system has preferable qualities, but you may simply disagree. Thus I say that morality is subjective. And without a fixed basis or foundation (such as "Natural Law" was hoped to provide), it can also continue to permute and evolve as our thinking evolves, and is unlikely to ever truly be "finished" – hence I say that it is fluid.

Bouncing Pigs

chiefoperator — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 20:07:09 GMT

So, Mr. Butterscotch and Mr. Mike are on pig-safari... And Mike is clearly just very, very happy to be here. He just went into a little almost sort of fit, where his hind-quarters would try to jump up into the air, pretty much as though they had a mind of their own. It looks like a form of what guinea pig owners call "popcorning", except that instead of the whole pig going into the air, it looked for all the world like his back-end was trying to play leapfrog with his front end...

...Only he did it about twice (and for those of you who think there might be something wrong with him, really, he only does it when he's excited, and we're pretty sure it's when he's having a good time) but then, it was like he got embarassed or something, and he went and burrowed under the towel that I have draped over his pigloo, and he did it again about 20 more times in rapid succession, under the towel. Oh, it was silly looking. Huge hunks of towel suddenly hopping up into the air...

Oh well. Back to reality.

Interesting Climate-Related Lecture..

chiefoperator — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 03:36:58 GMT

So I just got back from a lecture hosted by MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Richard Alley (Pennsylvania State University) on “Fraying at the edges: ice sheets, climate and sea levels.”

Quite interesting. His context is basically that there is global warming, that models support the idea that it has both natural and human-induced contributions, that the warming so far is slight compared to what will come, and that it will continue, with some uncertainties as to rate, through at least about 2100.

He studies ice. (Actually, what he said was something very much like: “We do ice. We have more fun doing ice than you have doing whatever it is you do, and you should come and do ice with us.”) He is concerned with the melting of large ice sheets such as those over Greenland and Antarctica, and he basically had three points to make:

1. Movement of ice sheets may be more sensitive to warming than has been previously understood. As ice spreads and thins, it melts more quickly; the melt-water kind of lubricates it, and then it spreads and thins in an accelerating way. While it would take a long time for the ice sheets to melt in place, previous models have not taken into account the positive feedback that might act if their motion is enhanced.

2. They have found that the motion of ice sheets is actually strongly affected by conditions at the perimeters; the rising of the tide can slow the motion of a glacier at its face by a factor of 2, and the effect of the slow-down can be see up to 80 km inland. Where floating ice forms ice shelves at the margins of ice sheets, those ice shelves slow down the spreading of the ice upstream on the land.

3. These floating ice shelves seem to be much more sensitive to temperature changes than the ice sheets they border; they are in a warmer environment, being floating on the liquid seas, and therefore much closer to state change. The Larsen B ice shelf, off Antarctica, which was 220 meters thick, basically disintegrated over the course of a few weeks in early 2002.

The summarized predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as of 2001 did not anticipate extensive ice loss from the major ice sheets as a result of the expected levels of global warming; increased snowfall was expected to make up for increased rate of melting. It would be easy to project from his remarks that he felt that this view was incorrect, and that slight changes in temperature could cause collapse of the ice shelves, leading to higher motion of the ice sheets, leading to more melting of them in turn, BUT Professor Alley was cautious to advise that his work raises more questions than it answers. Models based on the new observations and measurements are still in preliminary development, and not able to make any predictions useful for policy-making at this point.

I strongly recommend the Synthesis Report (Summary of Policymakers) of the “Third Assessment Report” of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), available on line.

Full Moon Tonight

chiefoperator — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 15:19:01 GMT

Once a month the moon is full... Once a month, the moon is at perigee (closest to the earth). These two things do not always line up the same, but when the moon is at perigee, it appears to be 14% larger in diameter, or about 30% larger in area.

The only reason I bring it up is that the moon is almost full, and this is the time of year when full moons and perigees line up.. The full moon this month is only about 13 hours different from the point of perigee, which I believe puts us at about 99% of the maximum size. And the full moon is at 3:13 on the 7th, in "Universal Time", which I believe puts it at about 10 PM tonight.

So if the weather clears, and you're up, and you look up at the moon and think, "Gee, it looks particularly large and impressive tonight", it might NOT be your imagination!

NPR Good....

chiefoperator — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 00:54:13 GMT

Wow.

Randomly driving to work, listening to radio; severe boredom w/ country music station; randomly flip to NPR... Oh, listen, it's Noam Chomsky vs. Alan Dershowitz... How cool is that!?!

Sound-bite version: Both very critical of Bush administration, deeply concerned about structural problems with american process, influence of big business on politics, etc. Differences: Alan thinks Noam loses the audience by making the message too extreme; Noam says "Hey, I'm just calling a spade a spade." (OK, not an exact quote.)

I can see it; it's a dilemma. If you soft-sell the message ("We've got issues, but they're not so bad..") then people won't think it's really vital that they act, but if you amp it up ("It's the end of democracy as we know it!") then you look extremest - not to mention alarming - and people will tend to find excuses to discount you, because they prefer denial.

Sigh. Back to work.

Weather grokking...

chiefoperator — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 00:20:30 GMT

So, I was reading a book about weather, and some of it finally started to make sense... So I am going to write parts of it down to try to cement it in my memory.

So, it turns out the really interesting parts of weather are all about eddies..

The sun heats the ground which heats the air, which expands, gets lighter, and rises. It does this more at the equator than elsewhere, so without coriolis force, the overall airflow would be toward the poles in the higher layers of the atmosphere, as the hot, light air expands and moves away from the hotspot and the updraft, and then a return flow of cold air down from the poles at ground level.

Only coriolis force twists the vectors, so instead of heading straight for the pole (or equator), the winds get pushed sideways as they travel. And actually, the coriolis force is so strong that most of the air doesn't make it to the pole, and by the time it gets to 30 degrees north or so, it's going so much sideways that it can't really circulate any further north, and heads back down to the ground and turns south again.

So there are these separated bands of circulation, basically three of them in each hemisphere. The air at the equator, for instance, circulates up (being hot), and then north and east, to about 30 degrees, and then down again, and south and west, and so on and on.

There's an updrafty calm zone at the equator, where both the bands that touch are moving air up, and a down-drafty calm zone in the "horse latitudes" where the first and second bands meet, and the third band isn't really a band, it's more like a cap of circulating, spiraling cold air over the pole, and where it meets the middle band is the "permanent polar front".

Now, all the air at the polar front is rising, but the polar air is cold, southbound, and twisted west, and the air from the temperate zone meeting it is northbound, and being twisted to the east, and they kind of rub against each other.

Now, when you have two streams of any fluids passing each other in conflicting directions, you basically always get ripples that can turn into eddies. When water moves over sand, you get ripples. When air moves over sand, you get ripples. When air moves over water, you get waves. Why? I forget exactly, but basically, having a completely flat planar boundary between the fluids is in principle an equilibrium, but it's an unstable one, and once some tiny thing throws it off, the system falls off into another state entirely -- like a pencil floating vertically and then flopping over onto its side.

In the case of ripples and waves, the relative speeds and densities of the two media determine what the amplitudes and wavelengths of the waves will be.

But if the two streams are the same material, and they're meeting horizontally so that gravity doesn't prevent it, then when the amplitudes of the waves get big enough, instead of breaking, they turn into eddies.

The high pressure systems that come across the US are generated as eddies between the temperate flow zone and the polar zone, at the permanent polar front, and then spin off across the country.

But when two high pressure systems meet up, since they're spinning with the same sense, the air at the leading edge of one is going the opposite direction from the air at the trailing edge of the other one, and when you get an eddy between them, that's where low-pressure systems come from.

If it weren't for that, there wouldn't be "lows" per se; lots of the L's on the weather map are actually just low-pressure troughs between highs, and the front lines that are indicated are fronts between one high and another... Only once it a while does an actually circulating Low form and develop an identity of its own.

Oh, I could go on and on about why unstable air masses are more likely to rain, and what makes them unstable... (they're unstable because they're colder than the land they're running over, so it heats them on the bottom and they churn up the air, as opposed to stable ones which are hotter than the land, which, when the land cools them on the bottom, that air stays on the bottom. And when air circulates between hot and cold, naturally it picks up water when its hot and dumps it when it cools..) or the fact that tornadoes and hurricanes are eddies too... Or the fact that you can see clouds generated by the ripple effect when one air mass is moving over another, and it forms ripples, and then when the lower air is pulled up it's cooled adiabatically (i.e., by the act of rising to a higher altitude where the pressure is lower) and the water in it condenses into clouds...

But maybe I should stop.

*Sigh* I get so excited about understanding things, and then I'm not truly happy until I try to explain it...

Well, I guess that's a feature of LJ my wife perhaps appreciates more than I do, most of the time: if you have a burning desire to explain something, you can do it without anybody having to suffer...

Another furry friend lost...

chiefoperator — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 16:55:57 GMT

It is with great sadness that I must announce that Mr. Clover, guinea pig, has gone to the Rainbow Bridge. He died at about 8:30 PM, Tuesday, August 15, 2006. His passing was assisted by the very kind veterinary staff of the VCA Wakefield, MA, and we are grateful for all of their help with his care. He was attended at the last by his daddy-slave, Steve, and his brother-pig, Butterscotch. His mommy-slave and his auntie were away traveling, but we told him that they loved him too. He had been ill, with respiratory impairment which was not responding to treatment, and which was ultimately found by X-ray to be the result of a large mass in his lungs, probably a tumor; results of biopsy are pending. He was only about 3 years old. He was a shy pig, calico with rich reddish brown and bristly fur on his nose, and fond of his carrots and parsley, and he loved to snuggle into my armpit between my shirt and undershirt on a cold winter evening after salad time. He was a good pig, much loved, and he will be sorely missed.

Good-bye, Clover...

To Max, wherever you are...

chiefoperator — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 02:44:26 GMT

Today I met a man who called himself Max.

He was walking by our house, and stopped to talk. He gave me flowers for my wife - told that if we dried them and planted them, we could grow them - and a pair of small stones. From Mexico.

Max looked for all the world like he was carrying everything he owned in the world in the pack on his back, and he said he hadn't been here for 40 years and he was looking for his family, but they were gone.

I offered him water, but he declined; he asked me if there was a restaurant around, and I pointed him up toward Main St.

A couple of minutes later, I felt bad about letting him go; he looked like he really, really needed someone or something good to happen to him. I went after him, and I actually managed to catch up to him. He was still looking for his restaurant - but he also mentioned that he only had 4 dollars.

I told him he could come back with me if he wanted, but he was reluctant. He was embarrassed about the way he was dressed, the way he looked. I said he should come back if he changed his mind, if he had nowhere else to go. I don't know what the chances are I'll ever see him again.

The thing is, we could easily have let him into our home, let him shower, wash his clothes, give him food, water, money - more than his 4 dollars, anyway - now I wonder, why didn't I try harder to convince him to come back?

Yes, it's possible that would have been a hideous mistake, but I don't think so. Yes, it was at least in part up to him to decide, and I left the door open for him, so "it's not my fault".

But I think he knew that even as I was offering to help him, I was nervous about it, nervous about him...

Why is it so hard to give with both hands, with your whole heart?

Foo.

Astronomy Tidbit: Algol, the Demon Star...

chiefoperator — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:35:20 GMT

If you don't know about the star Algol, the thing that makes it interesting is that it is basically the only star in the sky that "winks". It is normally magnitude 2.3 or so, a medium-bright star in the constellation Perseus, near Cassiopeia - but about ever 3 days, it goes through a cycle where it gets progressively dimmer over the course of about 5 hours, down to about magnitude 3.5, and then brightens back up. Since many of the stars in the neighborhood are about that same magnitude, when it is at its dimmest, it seems to fade into the background, and virtually disappears.

It's actually 2 stars, and the dimmer one sometimes moves in front and blocks the brighter one. There are lots of other variable stars - but most of the others are either varying much to fast or much to slowly or much to slightly or are too dim to start with for anybody to ever notice that they're varying with the naked eye. As far as I know, Algol is the only one.

Now to actually see it is not so simple; sometimes Algol isn't up when it happens, or it's up, but it's daytime then, or it's cloudy.. But it is pretty neat to see if you're patient enough to actually catch it at it.

The ancients were sufficiently impressed that they named it based on its demonic character; apparently the name Algol comes from arabic Al Gul, where Gul is from the same origin as the English word ghoul, and means "the demon" or something similar.

This all is fine, and if you didn't know about Algol, now you do.

The thing is, my customary handy reference in re the stars, H. A. Rey's "The Stars", actually has been doing me a disservice; in Rey's book, he helpfully tries to simplify people's mental pictures of what the constellations look like and how the various stars match up with the parts of the picture they're supposed to form. In this vein, as he draws Perseus, he puts Algol basically in the hero's left foot. Why would anybody create a constellation with a winking demonic star in the left foot? Who knows.

But then, for no particular reason, I was reading a book of collected essays by Isaac Azimov recently, and he happened to mention Algol. (The rest of the book is about his predictions, circa 1960, about how life would be in the year 2000... interesting, but he was WAY off. Didn't quite picture the computer catching on the way it did, or speculate about global warming, or AIDS.... Was pretty sure we'd have hover cars and pneumatic communicating tubes between our office buildings and horrible famines due to overpopulation...)

And he mentions off-hand that Algol is supposed to be the EYE in the head of MEDUSA, that Perseus is dragging around with him!!! And it was like "Ohhhh!!! That makes so much more SENSE!!!!"

Which just goes to show you... something. There's a lesson there, but I'm not quite sure what it is...

"Unfaithful"

chiefoperator — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 08:24:02 GMT

Random note: I happened to watch "Unfaithful" (with Diane Lane and Richard Gere) the other day, and I have to say, I thought it had some of the best craftsmanship I've seen in a movie in a long time. I don't think I'm giving away too much to reveal that the film has basically three parts: the initial seduction, the middle bit, and the part after everything goes to hell. Now, the way the plot unfolds in the third section I was not too overwhelmed by, but the first part is WONDERFUL; there is some very good dialogue, some excellent acting, excellent directing.. you get the idea. You just don't see that kind of care going into the craft of a movie that often.

Key line: "There is no such thing as a mistake; there is only what you do, and what you don't do."

At the end of the movie, do we believe it? The jury's still out...

Why Not Eat Meat?

chiefoperator — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 13:54:48 GMT

I hate when people stage elaborate rationalizations for things that really truly have intimate emotional causes, but they act like it's all about some logical thing. So I'll say right up front that the primary reason I haven't been eating meat recently (and it's not even an absolute absention) is that my heart's just not in it. Yes, that's "just not in it, since Niles died."

On the other hand, I do think there really are philosophical and moral reasons not to do it. (Are there good reasons for bombarding my friends with a protracted explanation of what I think those reasons are? Hmmm...)

It is a fundamental facet of morality that we must protect the less-able around us. Without drilling down to bare-dirt fundamentals, consider the morality of theft: Allen has apples; Bill wants them. If Bill asks Allen and Allen wants to trade them or give them away, that's fine because he's operating with free will. If Allen is asleep, however, and Bill comes over and tries to take the apples anyway, that's wrong. Now suppose that Charlie is sitting nearby, and sees Bill's attempt - what should he do? Apply the fundamental reflexive principle (aka the "Golden Rule"); what would Charlie want Allen to do if their positions were reversed: "Stop him, please!, you idiot!" So Charlie says, "Uh, hey Bill, what's up with taking Allen's apples like that, dude?"

To have a fabric of society, we need to have more-or-less agreed upon rules, which we agree to obey (more or less) and we can expect (more or less) others to obey and we can expect other others to enforce on the others who won't obey when we're not in a position to do so.

This applies to those who are asleep or away on vacation, but also to children and the insane. In addition, in the latter cases, we feel empowered to stand "in loco parentis"; the sleeper expresses no opinions. The lunatic DOES express opinions, but we ignore them because we believe we know better.

To what extent does this apply to animals or not? Many, many arguments have been run up the flagpole as to why humans are special and different and more important than animals and so should have carte blanche to treat animals however they want... "Oh, WE have SOULS. WE use symbolic language. WE make such advanced tools."

To my eye, there is no good basis for putting ourselves in a special category. We regarded brain-damaged humans and newborns as being within the envelope of our protection, so it's clearly not a function of the actual intelligence of the being in question. And it's pretty clear when you consider chimps and dolphins and whales, that we're not the only species that uses tools, and probably others have reasonably developed languages that we just haven't figured out yet.

After all, how would we feel if aliens landed and started eating us? "Well, according to our sacred book, the Alienbible, our god tells us we are allowed to eat anything that has less than 12 eyes.. Now would you kindly stop fussing and get in the pot?" The interesting question isn't would we resist (of course) or would we be angry (of course) but would we feel this treatment was UNFAIR? Alternatively, you can imagine a time far in the future when humans are not the dominant species anymore... suppose the new overlords established a policy of treating us with the same humanity and kindness that we treated them?

So, basically, what I am suggesting is that we should be considering our "family", those to whom our obligation of protection extends, to be all living things, rather than just humans. So I am thinking that one's fundamental principle should be something on the order of: "Harm no living thing except in need."

Now, it's true that animals in nature do kill and eat each other all the time. And we expect them to struggle to survive, and to do whatever they have to to live, and we have a right to do the same, so if you are starving on a desert island and you have to kill an animal and eat it so that you don't die, I would say: go right ahead. I would.

BUT I think we have an obligation not to do so capriciously. Now, obviously, the boundary between "need" and "want" is very fuzzy; did we NEED a four-lane superhighway between Podunk and Anaheim that steamrollered over all kinds of living things and their habitats, or did we just decide we would LIKE one? Clearly, there are lots of judgement calls to be made - but there's a burden on us, as the ones with the greater technology, to use it wisely, and minimalistically. The first corollary of the fundamental principle might be something like "Live in a way that you make the smallest mark on nature that you can."

So I'm not eating meat.. Not for now, anyway, while I think things through some more.

There are some miscellaneous notions that bop around in my head that really didn't neatly fall into the above, also.

For one thing, there's the reincarnation problem. While my sense is that the probability of reincarnation being true is really, really low, I can't rule it out. And since Niles died, I actually have found myself wondering: could that bird over there, or that squirrel, be him in spirit?

It's not the actual eating of the meat that's the problem, so much as the killing of the animals to get it. This leads to some interesting exceptions... if a moose gets killed in an accident with a car, that's very different - then I hope you will keep me in mind when distributing the moose steaks! Or if a human voluntarily agreed to be consumed... that would presumably be OK.

Again, to put my cards clearly on the table, whether my rationalizations hold water or not, one reason I will definitely think twice about it from now on, is that Niles himself wouldn't do it. (As Eddie Izzard says, "Can there really be such a thing as an Evil herbivore?") As with other elements of his character, in this his goodness was born of innocence; it simply was not in his makeup to eat meat. Meat is not food, as far as pigsters are concerned.

I still miss him...

Mind-Meld Gone Bad...

chiefoperator — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 08:24:19 GMT

OK, I give up. So far, my journal entries about Mr. Niles have been carefully edited and couched in ways to try to project particular points of view without seeming insane. That's not quite doing it for me any more. Hopefully, I will manage to get the rest of what follows behind cut; otherwise...

I still miss him so much it's almost unbearable at times. My latest version of trying to explain is that it's like I went into mind-meld with him while he was sick, and you'd better believe that's not a smart thing to do with a creature that's about to die. It does seem to be wearing off, a little, very very slowly, which will probably come as something of a comfort to my wife, who I'm sure thinks I've gone quite insane.

I miss him I miss him I miss him I miss him. I remember exactly what it was like to lie with him snestled on my shoulder, getting the collar of my shirt all schmutzy with the stupid gunk we were feeding him. I wrote most of that with my eyes closed 'cause I was weeping as I did it.

Every night, when he was sick, just before I would put him to bed, I would pick him up, and cradle him in my hands, just like a cup, and he would just nestle there and look back out at me with his little black eyes, so intent, and I would try to peer into his mind, to see what he wanted, to see if he was OK, if he felt like having me sing to him a bit or pet him a bit, and that's the look I most remember, him looking back at me those times.

It's wearing off, and I don't want it to. I don't want to forget the way he really was, but memory is like that.. he's slowly turning into some kind of idealized recollection of himself. Sooner or later I will get over it and I will feel better and I DON"T WANT TO LET GO!!!!

I don't think I will ever forget when he ate the first piece of apple after he got sick... he hadn't eaten anything at all for a while, and he was all dehydrated, and we didn't know why he was sick and we weren't sure what it was safe to feed him or not, (he wasn't even eating HAY, for heaven's sake) but we gave him some apple anyway, and it was the strangest thing... it was like it was a huge, huge effort to force it down, but at the same time, it was like it was just to wonderful to pass up, and as he would nibble up a bit and swallow it, his ears would twitch in the weirdest way, like I'd never seen them do before..

I don't believe any more that quality and quantity of character have anything to do with each other. I don't care if people think I'm crazy. My wife doesn't believe that I can even know as much about his state of mind as I claim to be able to know, but I know deep in my heart that he was GOOD. He was so sweet... I know he loved us... Loves us still, I hope. I have no idea if there's a god or gods or supreme beings or whatever, and if it was just for my own sake, it seems like it would be hypocritical to pray to him/her/them "just in case", but I have been praying, a little, or something like it, sometimes now, that whoever is out there, if it's not too late, that they take care of him.

It's true that innocence does not equate to greatness; if you are of such simple stuff that you never even consider hurting another creature, you won't get a Nobel prize for self-discipline, you don't deserve a medal for morality - but GOOD I think you get credit for. Everybody (and I include animals) has a quality of character; some of us have tempers and some of us are sweet. Some of us have faith and some are cynics. Some of us are friendly and some are not. And that goes for everybody, human-people, horses, cats and dogs, probably lots of other animals, and guinea pigs too. So doesn't it stand to reason that in terms of the QUALITY of their character, even a teeny tiny person could have a heart of gold?

I still go out and sing to him, sometimes, in his new little spot in the yard. It's almost not that different; when he was real, real sick, he would hardly eat anything and he didn't move around much at all... now he's just a little more still, and he eats a little less.

God, I hope I see him again some day. I can't bear the thought that he's just gone, gone forever. Please tell me it's not so.

Forecast: Gloomy with intermittent cloudbursts...

chiefoperator — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 16:54:18 GMT

Still having trouble coping with loss of small, furry, friend. It catches up with me at odd times - like now, which is pretty unfortunate, since it's the middle of the day and I'm at work. (!)

I am especially having trouble with meat. While for some reason it didn't seem a problem for me to have a nice roast beef sandwich while he puttered around while he was alive, since he died, the idea that somebody would kill an animal so that I could eat it is just unbearable.

Precious Gifts

chiefoperator — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 01:09:22 GMT

.. So I lost a dear, dear (small) friend; Niles Cougar, The Good Pig, passed away on Friday. It's so hard to lose him now; in his last weeks, I feel like I poured my heart into trying to keep him alive. We spent hours hand-feeding him, trying to nurse him back to health, and just holding him and stroking him and trying to keep him company.

I know people get attached to their pets, and I know almost all guinea pigs are cute and gentle to start with, but I swear, there was a GOODNESS that flowed from him like a fountain. Having him with us was a blessing; he was tiny and fragile, but he was pure of heart. Heather, thank you.